Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770-1839 022666712X, 9780226667126

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LISTENING TO CHINA

also published in the series Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music Holly Watkins Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks David Yearsley The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality Edited by Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin

L ISTENI NG TO CHINA Sound and the Sino-­Western Encounter, 1770–­1839

t homas irv i ne

t h e un iv er sit y of c h ic ag o pr e s s Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66712-­6 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­66726-­3 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226667263.001.0001 This book has been supported by the Gustave Reese Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Irvine, Thomas, author. Title: Listening to China : sound and the Sino-Western encounter, 1770–1839 / Thomas Irvine. Other titles: New material histories of music. Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: New material histories of music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019047730 | isbn 9780226667126 (cloth) | isbn 9780226667263 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Musicology—Europe—History—18th century. | Musicology—Europe— History—19th century. | Musical criticism—Europe—History—18th century. | Musical criticism—Europe—History—19th century. | Music—China—History and criticism. | Europe—Relations—China. | China—Relations—Europe. | Burney, Charles, 1726–1814. | Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 1749–1818. | Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 1795–1866. Classification: lcc ml3797.2.e87 i78 2020 | ddc 780.951—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047730 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To the memory of my mother, Olga Zilboorg (1933–­2017), in gratitude

c ont ent s

introduction

Process and Perspective  1 1 China and the Enlightened Ear  25 2 Soundscapes in the Contact Zone: Listening in Canton, 1770–­1839  53 3 Charles Burney Discovers China  87 4 Sound and the Macartney Mission, 1792–­1794  109 5 Reading Burney Listening to China  139 6 Listening to China with Forkel and Marx  159 epilogue

Sound and the Sino-­Western Encounter  182 Acknowledgments  201 Notes  205 Bibliography  231 Index  251

i nt rodu c t ion

Process and Perspective

China has most consistently been characterised as a limit or a potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and similarity, and thus, because what is at stake in the era of modernity in the West is the dream of the universalisation of culture, as a horizon of the very idea of horizons, a horizon, that is, that marks the limit of the universal as a transcendental field. eric hayot , The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain

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hrough its encounter with china, the west remade itself in sound. That is the argument of this book, which tells the story of Western people experiencing China with their ears around 1800.1 To tell it I draw on two sets of sources. The first set are documents of  Western listening in China—­to music and musical theater, but also to other human-­ generated sounds such as gongs, cannon salutes, and speech—­at the height of the “Canton System,” the trading relationship between China and the West that came to a violent end in the First Opium War of 1839–­42. The second set of sources are texts by European writers, mostly music scholars, who wrote about China and Chinese music around 1800. None traveled to China or heard the country’s music directly. Indeed, whether or not they even heard real Chinese music, Westerners in this era did not always distinguish between it and other kinds of Chinese sounds. This is not only a book about music, it is also book about sound. In a book that crosses boundaries between musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, history, sinology, and postcolonial studies, it would be coun­­ terproductive—­and arrogant—­to identify exclusively with the perspective

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of any one discipline. As a music historian by training, I can perhaps assert that I have a somewhat sharper sense of hearing. My primary objective is to better understand Westerners’ collection of sonic knowledge of China during the late Enlightenment.2 I want to show how China sounded to Westerners around 1800, in order to give to the history of Western constructions of China a previously missing perspective. At the same time I want to “globalize” the idea of a specifically Western music history—­a history that often makes claims to “universal” value—­by showing how comparison with a great “other” (China) helped this history to emerge. In this sense I am ex­­ ploring the conceptual foundations and limits of  “ Western music history” itself. Many of the subjects of this book were haunted by the Western dream, born in the Enlightenment, of the universal ear. Yet even at the moment it was adopted as philosophical consensus, the idea that all senses everywhere were the same became a matter of significant controversy. As Avi Lifschitz has written, in mid-­ to late eighteenth-­century Europe numerous writers and thinkers debated questions of human communication and comprehension.3 The result was a new understanding of the ear as a gateway to the world.4 The Europeans who thought about listening did not by any means stop thinking at Europe’s borders. They considered the idea that different peoples heard differently. For some China became—­in the sense of the quotation from Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin in the epigraph—­a limit and horizon of how Europeans thought about music or, to put it more broadly, the relation between people and sounds.5 Others, especially earlier in the eighteenth century, were more generous and looked for what Chinese and Western listening shared. By the third decade of the nineteenth century such views were rare. The universal ear was dead, replaced by a (sup­posedly) universally valid technology for combining sounds: Western art music. This book unfolds between chronological markers signifying the emergence of  Britain as the leading player in the China trade and the violent im­­ position of British authority over the trade in the First Opium War. These markers also bracket a crucial moment in Western music history, the period “around 1800.” In these decades, so a widely repeated narrative goes, composers in Europe turned to instrumental music, once scorned as conceptually vague if not meaningless, and found in it a rich harmonic language fit to express the wordless “infinite longing” that so enchanted Romantic critics.6 Of course there is no direct causal relation between the triumph of Anglo-­ American free trade and the “rise” of a philosophical attitude toward music. But there is a story to tell about how European writers, with growing inten-

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sity, used what they found different in Chinese attitudes toward sound to illustrate what was right about music in Europe. I will argue here that they did not do this in a vacuum. Western visitors soon discovered how strange China sounded. When the British official John Barrow first entered Beijing in the summer of 1793 he remarked on “the buz [sic] and confused noises of [the] mixed multitude.”7 A British medical doctor in Canton in the early nineteenth century described the sonic impression of the traffic-­filled Pearl River as “the entrance to Pandemonium.”8 A few reported that large crowds seemed noisier than those at home, an experience many visitors to the Chinese-­speaking world still have today.9 Some reached for the familiar. Informed by what they had already read about Chinese sound worlds, for example, they associated Chinese outdoor wind bands with Scots bagpipes; others compared the singing of Chinese street beggars to that of those in London. A few experienced Chinese theater, almost always sung, and compared its numbers to the arias and recitatives of European opera. But many found the sheer loudness of Chinese sound worlds strange and uncomfortable. Temple bells, fireworks, and the high-­pitched falsetto of the­­ atrical singing, audible for miles in the preindustrial soundscapes of Canton or imperial Beijing, seemed to some Westerners never to stop. Charles Toogood Downing, who experienced the soundscape of the Pearl River as “pandemonium,” remembered in frustration the sounds of village theater he heard from his ship at anchor near Canton. “The sound haunts you,” he wrote.10 Listening to China, witnesses like Downing heard and felt its difference. Such experience of difference flatly contradicted the idea that the way sound worked on people was a universal thing. In other words, they experienced with their own ears the tension between the “made” experience of sound in an environment profoundly different from what they were used to and their assumption that human nature everywhere is “given.”11 Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century Europeans—­those who made what we often call “the Enlightenment,” as if it were self-­evidently a “given” global phenomenon—­had been thinking about China, along with the rest of the non-­European world, against a background of changing notions of what it meant to be human at all.12 As Sebastian Conrad has argued, the idea that the European Enlightenment found the “ingredients of the modern” and then “exported” these “to the rest of the world” is “no longer tenable.”13 This book, using sound, music, and listening as its focus, positions the Western Enlightenment—­in the eyes of its protagonists a globally valid perspective—­against a material process that unfolded on a vast scale: the

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West’s changing economic and political relationship with China. I will argue that such enlightened perspectives were (and are) in fact provincial. The processes against which they were iterated and reiterated, however, such as the expansion of  Western interest in China, driven by the search for ever more profit from trade in commodities such as tea and opium, and the nascent imperialism that accompanied this expansion, were global. My argument unfolds in two strands. The first explores how Westerners in China experienced China in sound. Their experiences, related in case stud­­ ies that draw on published travel writing, diaries, journalism, correspondence published and unpublished, and manuscript accounts, are the subjects of three of the chapters that follow. The rest of the book explores a second theme: how Europeans who had never been to China imagined its sounds, most often through speculating about its music, which none of them ever heard. These writers were “enlightened” music historians. As the European public sphere filled with reports of non-­European musical practices, music historians took up the challenge of building these into their histories. Three major European music scholars—­the British man of musical letters Charles Burney and two Germans, Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Adolf Bernhard Marx—­attempted to account for China in global music history. Each dismissed China because it did not fit their models of musical progress, which were really models of development toward their own European present. In addition, each contributed substantially to establishing the study of music as an independent scholarly discipline.14 It is no coincidence that all were proponents of the “new” instrumental music that supposedly swept across Europe around 1800. Burney, Forkel, and Marx, each in his own way, dismissed Chinese music as primitive and historically irrelevant. I will argue here that their dismissals reveal insecurities about the place of  Western music in world music history. All three, in fact, failed to integrate China into their wider projects (Burney’s General History of Music, Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, and Marx’s lifetime of writing about musical form and expression). Instead—­ as if they were trying to push the subject aside—­their thoughts on Chinese music history appear in second-­order texts: Burney’s and Marx’s in articles for reference works and Forkel’s in a book review. This reluctance to face China head-­on is symptomatic of what Hayot calls China’s “ideological threat” to European histories of progress. Each of their responses, I will show here, was conditioned by a particular intellectual context. For Burney, Chinese music’s reliance on melody challenged a developmental model of music history in which monody gives way over time to polyphony. The

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Chinese rejection of counterpoint reminded him explicitly of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s famous plea for musical simplicity, which he rejected, albeit with reluctance. Forkel shared Burney’s unease on this point but used China’s state-­centered musical life to explore how political authority in Europe might shape musical practices. Marx, finally, used the case of Chinese music history to demonstrate Hegel’s idea of the World Spirit revealing itself in music as history “moved from East to West.” The work of all three shows how ostensibly national musical concerns were formed by Europe’s purportedly universal or global imperatives. In this sense writing about China in Western music history is the history of European answers to global questions, especially as conceived by those who imagined the globe as a “given” category destined to be dominated by Europe. In this book I argue that the encounter with China went to the heart of the Western ear’s attempt to come to terms with itself.

Imperial Ears China has long featured in the way Europeans understand themselves. From at least the mid-­seventeenth century onward Europeans were drawn to aspects of Chinese material culture perceived by the eye, such as wallpaper, textiles, and porcelain.15 Western travelers to China filled their reports with descriptions of landscapes, buildings, gardens, and costumes. Such reports and the consumption of Chinese luxury goods that went with them fueled the Europe-­wide phenomenon of “chinoiserie.” In England, as Eugenia Zuroski argues, the “thing Chinese” had become so thoroughly naturalized that “it was impossible to conceive of English identity without attendant notions of Chineseness.”16 The story I trace here unfolds against the relative decline of chinoiserie, if chinoiserie is understood to denote uncritical openness to the “thing Chinese.” This turn against China and its cultural products has been explained in many accounts.17 I wish to foreground a material concern, a (gradual, not sudden) change in economic relations between the West and China as the stability of the previously established “Canton System” gave way, thanks in large part to increasingly successful British attempts to undermine Chinese sovereignty, to the chaos that ended in the First Opium War of 1839–­42. Chinoiserie was an aesthetic phenomenon rooted in the consumption of luxury goods and popular literary constructions. Yet around 1800 the European public began to pay greater attention to the material conditions of the China trade alongside the products it brought to their shores. One

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index is the popularity of paintings of the trade and its protagonists, notably by the Macao-­based British painter George Chinnery and his followers.18 Similarly, Chinese plants went from crucial adornments in the genteel garden to being objects of intense botanical interest—­evinced by a boom in scientific publications—­much of it motivated by the economic ambition to replace such valuable commodities as Chinese tea with alternatives grown under direct Western control.19 At the same time, Western audiences snapped up visual material portraying Chinese everyday life, such as the published drawings and prints by members of the Macartney Embassy of 1792–­94.20 Finally, drawings by the first Western medical doctors working in the semitolerated environment of the Western factories in Canton of the often gruesome ailments afflicting their patients also reached a large Western public.21 Today such visual regimes are the subject of their own subgenre of postcolonial critique. One influential contribution to this literature is Mary Louise Pratt’s book, now thirty years old, Imperial Eyes.22 In the same era, Edward Said famously defined imperialism as “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of the dominating metropolis.”23 The senses are practices informed by theories and attitudes; Karl Marx pointed this out in 1844 when he wrote that “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.”24 Pratt’s imperial viewing takes place primarily in Africa and Latin America but depends on the same kind of travel writing I draw on here. She suggests that Western viewers developed particular ways of seeing colonial others in areas she calls “contact zones.” In such spaces Westerners saw the places they colonized and the people in them with “imperial eyes.” For Pratt imperial eyes fracture what they see into easily disciplined categories, cataloging the spoils of the imperial and colonial enterprise optically. In this book I expand the notion of “imperial eyes” to encompass the sense of hearing, searching for traces of “imperial ears.”25 The botanists, medical doctors, and artists who feature in Pratt’s work assembled views. The protagonists of my book collected sounds. Both reported their findings in travel literature and memoirs. A good number of the “scientific” visualizations Pratt discusses are devoid of human agency.26 Likewise, for many of the earwitnesses in this book, listening to China of­­ ten meant removing Chinese from their own soundscapes: sounds that peo­­ ple made (such as the ringing of temple bells or the cracking of fireworks) often appear as autonomous, separated from the people who made them. They seem timeless, as if they had always already been there. Thus such sounds became, as Ana María Ochoa Gaultier has written of similar re-

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gimes of listening in early nineteenth-­century Colombia, part of the natural soundscape, “given” not “made.”27 In addition, many Western listeners struggled to distinguish Chinese music from noise. They heard the sounds of military bands, the high-­pitched singing of sung drama, or the ceremonial music of the imperial court as noise, even though these were clearly music according to both Western and Chinese conceptions of the term.28 Music experienced as noise became another feature of China’s natural soundscape, indistinguishable from environmental sounds like those of wind or insects. Depopulated, China comes across as an aural terra nullius waiting to be exploited for Western gain. Yet, as I will show in chapters 2 and 4, some Western earwitnesses were indeed interested in the people making Chinese sounds. In chapter 2 I relate how Westerners on ships anchored at Whampoa near Canton sometimes went ashore and to seek out the human agents behind what they heard. Members of the Macartney Embassy, whose journey to China in 1792–­94 is the subject of chapter 4, including Lord Macartney himself, listened intently to Chinese sounds in hopes of using them to better understand the diplomatic stalemate they found themselves in. Further, the sonic history of the Macartney Embassy was marked, from the Western point of view, by a kind of reciprocity. As I will show, members of the embassy, including the ambassador’s personal band, offered their own sounds to Chinese ears. They were surprised at the negative reaction. Pratt calls on Marx in her discussion of the dark side of similar Western offers of visual reciprocity to nineteenth-­century Africans, for example, in widely circulated descriptions of the explorer Mungo Park offering himself for inspection to curious members of an African king’s seraglio.29 For Pratt such stories “sanitize” the imperial project by sentimentalizing it and by offering Africans the same false agency that Marx detects in capitalist doctrines of free trade. The “free trader vulgaris,” as Marx points out in Das Kapital, depends on the illusion that every form of commodity exchange is freely entered into.30 In the case of China—­well known to Marx—­the literal destruction of the Canton System in the British military intervention of 1839–­42 was accompanied by British traders’ and politicians’ constant sermonizing about their “right” to use force to compel the Chinese to allow free trade. In this book I aim to complicate, along similar lines, stories about what happens in imperial sonic encounters. How free is the imperial ear? When is it “free” to simply stop listening? To what extent is it beholden to the listener’s ideological commitments? And if, for Westerners, coming to terms with China’s sounds is crucial to understanding their own sonic world, including music, how do

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such commitments shape the consensus about “great music” that began to emerge around 1800?

Sound Studies Westerners in China around 1800 were not always able to distinguish Chinese music from noise, as demonstrated by Toogood Downing’s irritation with the sheer volume of Chinese musical theater. Some, but not all, Western listeners treated music they heard outside formal contexts such as court theaters as they would have sounds of the human and nonhuman environment. Chapter 2, which explores the listening experiences of  Westerners in pre-­1839 Canton, hardly any of them “qualified” musicians, will feature many such accounts, including reports such as Downing’s of falsetto singing from opera festivals coming together with the bang and crack of festive fireworks displays or the sound of the lute-­like pipa emerging from the background din of thousands of voices on the crowded Pearl River. In such cases their perception of Chinese music (or “musicking,” to use Christopher Small’s well-­worn phrase, meant to account for a wider spectrum of musical activities) crosses over to the “given” of environmental sound from the “made” sound of more formal musical practices.31 This insecurity about the status of the listened-­to also extends to musicking by subaltern Westerners and other non-­Chinese in China, particularly that of Canton’s global maritime workforce, who will likewise feature in chapter 2. All together, in many of the fragments of written accounts that make up the archive of this book, music merges with other sounds. Once this became clear to me, as a music historian I realized I had a choice: focus only on stories in which historical actors were sure they were hearing music or open my ears—­following the materially documented experiences of historical actors—­to a more capacious understanding of sonic experience. I chose the latter option and found methodological help in sound studies. Sound studies is now fully normalized as an academic discipline and has generated a literature so vast that an easy summary is difficult.32 Sound studies reaches across borders between musicology, history, ethnomusicology, cultural geography, science and technology studies, and literary studies. A key to my understanding of sound studies—­writing as a music historian—­is the idea that listening is a particular kind of material experience accessible through historical sources. It demands a methodology that reaches beyond the narrower boundaries of an aestheticizing, curatorial “musicology.” Thus

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the opening to other disciplines that sound studies offers is crucial. Histo­ rians, for example, some even proclaiming a “musical turn” in history, have been giving increasing attention to sound and music.33 Neil Gregor explains the growth in the opening of the historical ear in the past two decades as a sign of impatience with the hermeneutic imperatives of both the “new cultural history” and its music-­scholarly relation the “new musicology,” which featured prominently in disciplinary debates in the 1990s.34 Both read his­­ torical works of music for their political and social meanings and drew what Gregor calls “quite straight lines between politics and ideology . . . and culture.” The danger is in drawing such lines past the lived experience of protagonists in the historical archive. This happened, Gregor argues, thanks to a “now unmistakably dated language of  ‘representations,’ ” by which he means a mode of analysis—­in musical terms—­that privileges what supposedly autonomous works of art “do” on their own against how music works as sounding practice. In postcolonial contexts, as I will argue in the next section, this fixation on representation harmonized well with the kind of critique pioneered by Edward Said in his influential books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Gregor argues that a new, more pluralistic, approach is called for, one that makes visible “a greater range of problem spaces not obviously owned by one discipline or methodological approach—­the most obvious, perhaps, being sound studies.”35 Following Gregor, I place the present book in the “problem space” of materialist, historical sound studies. My aim is to imagine historically how China’s real or imagined sounds shaped the myriad ways Westerners constructed themselves as actors in a global historical panorama of politics, diplomacy, race, economy—­and music. This is just as true of those who listened to China on the spot as it is for those who wrote histories of China’s music back in Europe. Space matters in sound studies, in which a key concept is that of the soundscape.36 A soundscape is a space in which people meet in concord and conflict. A soundscape can be understood diachronically (changing through time) and synchronically (in the sense of many simultaneous sounding spaces in one place). Crucially, soundscapes resist arbitrary boundaries. The soundscape can be bounded physically—­a room in a palace, a city neighborhood, a ship—­holding social and cultural acts that make music (or noise). Chinese soundscapes that appear in this book include large outdoor spaces such as the Pearl River in Canton (chapter 2), the streets of Beijing, the Grand Canal, or the precincts of the imperial summer palace at Jehol (chapter 4). Others—­usually more bounded—­are in China, but of the West: the deck

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of an East India Company ship in Canton or the music room of the palace in Beijing that the Macartney Embassy used as a home for their temporary diplomatic mission. Yet others were far from China. Whenever Charles Burney, the subject of chapters 2 and 4, experimented at home in London with examples from his considerable collection of Chinese instruments (in particular his beloved sheng), he was creating a temporary Chinese soundscape. Soundscapes, finally, can also be notional. For the German music theorist and historian Adolf Bernhard Marx, who will appear in chapter 6, ancient China as a whole was a space where the World Spirit was first made audible in music. Whatever its size or nature, to study a soundscape historically is, as Bonnie Gordon writes, “to think through real sounds from the past.”37 This book is meant as an exercise in “thinking through” the sounds of the Western experience of China around 1800. In many disciplines the soundscape is already a familiar term, useful for its analogy with the word landscape and derivatives such as cityscape and seascape—­and indeed, following Arjun Appadurai, ethnoscapes, media­ scapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes.38 There is a danger here, already alluded to, of conceiving of such spaces as devoid of human agency. Some paradigms of recent work on historical soundscapes that avoid this pitfall are Emily Thompson’s The Soundscapes of Modernity, which examines the creation of particular spaces for sound and music in early twentieth-­ century America, and Aimee Boutin’s City of Noise, which builds on a classic of the sound studies literature, Alain Corbin’s Village Bells, to tell the story of Paris in the throes of its nineteenth-­century “Hausmannization” (the creation of a new, grand, and spacious urban architecture) through the experience of changes to its soundscape.39 A central figure in Boutin’s nar­ rative is the “aural flaneur,” a real historical earwitness through whom Boutin’s readers experience both the shift toward a more “modern,” orderly, and thus silent urban soundscape and the sense of loss and nostalgia this process engendered. More than a few “aural flaneurs” from among Western ear­­ witnesses to China in the years around 1800 will stroll across the pages that follow. Studies that parse Western early modernity and Enlightenment through the sense of listening, notably work by Richard Leppert and Veit Erlmann, played a large part in the initial impetus for this book.40 In recent years this literature has grown to include treatments of the sound of colonial and im­­ perial encounters. Among these Ana María Ochoa Gaultier’s recent ethnomusicological study Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century

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Colombia stands out as a methodological guide. Ochoa Gaultier frames her sonic account of early nineteenth-­century Colombia as an “acoustically tuned exploration of the written archive” and a search for “aurality” across “several sites of inscription.”41 By accounting for the complexity of sound’s presence in the written archive—­my experience writing this book confirms her obser­ vation that “listening is not a practice that is contained and readily available for the historian in one document”—­she provides a clear theoretical underpinning for studies such as mine that seek to capture sound in eras before mechanical recording as a historical source.42 By “aurality” she means that “the use of the ear in relation to the voice imbued the technology of writing with the traces and excesses of the acoustic.”43 Such “traces and excesses” are the basic stuff of this book. Ochoa Gaultier’s position is, in addition, highly relevant to the division of my argument into intertwining strands of intellectual history (of writing about Chinese music) and sonic-­experiential history (of Chinese sounds). In her account the heard and the written are not irreconcilable opposites. “[The] aural is not the other of the lettered city,” she writes, “but rather a formation and a force that seeps through its crevices, demanding the attention of its listeners, sometimes questioning and sometimes upholding, explicitly or implicitly, its very foundations.”44 The music historians who feature here (Forkel, Burney, and Marx) were all den­ izens of  “the lettered city.” They struggled—­mightily in Burney’s case—­to secure their narratives against Chinese aurality’s force and the questions it asked of them.

Postcolonialism, Sound, and Enlightenment Knowledge It is a commonplace of postcolonial critique that around 1800 Europe began to construct itself as the preordained master of the rest of the world.45 This is just as true in the fields of listening, sound, and music. In this era Westerners, as I have already argued, began to value their music for its “universal” aesthetic qualities.46 The acts of ordering and mapping Chinese sound worlds that Westerners undertook at the same time are impossible to separate from such assertions of hegemony. One aim of this book is examine this process more closely and so contribute to an overdue “decoloniza­ tion” of anglophone musicology.47 By attending to the sonic construction of China in the broader Western imagination, I hope to describe the soundscapes of the Sino-­Western encounter without illusions about the growing one-­sidedness of  Western listening. Even if Sino-­Western relations unfolded

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on a more or less level playing field in the era covered by this book, in the decades running up to the Opium Wars, Western violence toward China was at best tenuously suspended.48 In the imperial archive the subaltern voice is hard to hear. This is especially true for the archives I have relied on in this book: travel writing and other firsthand reports by visitors to High Qing China and books and essays on Chinese sounds by European authors. Even accounting for my focus on Western sources, the relative silence of Chinese voices in them is striking. Much of this has to do with the nature of the archive. Even if I wanted to somehow “envoice” Chinese protagonists in the soundscapes I discuss—­ and I do not, since to assume the power of bestowing voices would be an act of considerable hubris—­it would be very difficult to find the necessary historical evidence. For accessing unmediated Chinese perspectives, my project unfolds within archival, disciplinary, and linguistic realities. Chap­­ter 2 reconstructs the soundscapes of Canton in the first heyday of the China trade exclusively from Western perspectives. In fact, firsthand accounts of the China trade by Chinese participants are extremely rare. Economic historian Paul van Dyke, the leading expert writing in English on the Canton trade (who has the necessary command of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­ century Chinese languages and dialects) estimates that the Chinese side of the trade (customs administrators, local officials, and businesses of all sizes) generated “millions (and possibly billions)” of pages of records, all now lost save a few hundred preserved in Western archives.49 There is a small sinological secondary literature on musical aspects of the Macartney Embassy that was helpful indeed in writing chapter 4. Aside from this, as a non-­ sinologist I must thank the kindness of my own Chinese-­speaking informants for moments of access to a few shadows of Chinese participation in an oblique and difficult Sino-­Western dialogue about sound, music, and listening. So in a project like this the goal of establishing a Sino-­Western “dialogue” around a history of shared listening experiences would be illusory, however well-­meaning its postcolonial intentions. Indeed, the word dialogue itself invites complacency. In Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music, a study of (mis)representations of native practices in the colonized Atlantic world, Olivia Bloechl takes as her point of departure the inescapable truth that colonization was a disaster for the colonized, most of whom did not survive the encounter. She argues powerfully that “among the conditions shaping European music and its discourses [in this era] was the pressure of an otherness that bears witness to colonial domination.”50 In other words,

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the acts and discourses we construct as European music history came together in the shadow of Europeans’ near annihilation of the native peoples of the New World and the enslavement and oppression of those who survived. This was not dialogue; it was mostly murder. Accounting, of course, for the differences between the experiences of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean and the Chinese under Western colonial, quasi-­colonial, and imperial regimes, I share Bloechl’s approach. Like her, I propose that the growing colonial and imperial desire for China shaped Western attitudes toward listening to its sounds and equally shaped a new narrative of Western musical superiority. The European musical past, Bloechl continues, is “marked by external colonization” that “fundamentally shaped the conditions in which European music was performed, conceptualized, heard, and composed.”51 Bloechl focuses on difference—­between Western and non-­Western practices—­as a constitutive element of Europeans’ own construction of their musical selves. By concentrating on such acts of world making, she counters much of the recent critical literature on exoticism in Western music. This literature—­like much of the “new cultural history” and “new musicology” more broadly (see the discussion in the previous section), focuses on the appearance in musical works of materials reminiscent of non-­Western “others.”52 Bloechl—­ and I concur with her—­finds the authors of this scholarship reluctant to go beyond aesthetic representations of otherness in Western musical texts. Their engagement with representation overfamiliarizes differences. It defuses the radical potential inherent in the non-­Western “quite other.”53 The focus on the domestication of non-­Western sounds in works of Western music leaves too little room for critique. In the spirit of  Bloechl’s work, I understand the present book to be a contribution to “changing the subject” of this music history as it is traditionally practiced in the Euro-­North American academy and at institutions elsewhere where this academy sets the intellectual agenda.54 I would also like to think I share the ethics of her approach. There is no way to neutrally encounter the history of the processes that ended with the subjugation of China by a European “informal empire,” with its destructive effects on the material witnesses to Chinese cultural history. As in the case Bloechl inves­ tigates, the “New World” of the Caribbean and the Americas, the destruc­­ tion  brought about by imperialism in China has left profound negative traces in the archive, most importantly in the empty space where Chinese reports about the sonic history of this era ought to be. Although China as a state was never formally incorporated into the European imperial system,

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the result of the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War was the establishment of European spheres of influence around treaty ports along the coast. Consequently, the vastly weakened Chinese empire was unable to guarantee internal peace—­witness the carnage and destruction wrought by the Taiping Rebellion (1850–­64)—­and powerless to prevent further violent Western interventions. These included the Second Opium War of 1856–­60, which resulted in the destruction of the imperial summer palace at Yuan­ mingyuan near Beijing (which housed extensive collections of  Western musical objects including the automata discussed in chapter 3 of this book), and the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901.55 The Qing government fell, finally, in 1911, but there followed decades of civil disorder, warlordism, and finally all-­out war on Chinese territory. In this period direct Western influence may have been in decline, but the role of Western powers was taken up by Japan, which built both a formal and an informal empire of its own.56 The damage to China’s cultural patrimony over this long period was immense. As a result of China’s “century of humiliation,” the archive of its sounds is substantially compromised.57 No work in the area of Sino-­ Western cultural history is possible without acknowledging the horrible scale of the destruction of its artifacts at the hands of the West and Japan. Yet a radical postcolonial approach, while crucial, is not necessarily sufficient. As Kuan-­Hsing Chen writes, “[Postcolonial theory’s] central problem lies in its obsessive critique of the West, which bounds the field by the objects of its own criticism.”58 In other words, postcolonial theory can (ironically) exorcise, or at least suspend, the subaltern presences it is meant to invoke. Second, the Western Enlightenment—­even if without it Western colonialism and imperialism would have been impossible—­was not an Orientalist project through and through. Srinavas Aravamudan argues that “there is no gainsaying” the use of Orientalism as a means “to enhance the imperial management of subject people.”59 Nonetheless, he continues, “Enlightenment interrogation was not innocent—­no knowledge ever is—­but it was a complex questioning, with multiple objectives and orientations.” This is true of the cases considered in this book. For example, some European earwitnesses were enamored of Chinese music; others rejected it out of hand. Finally, Orientalism could not have constituted a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient until the development of imperial bureau­ cracies.”60 This is particularly true of the British encounter with China in the era I consider, before the definitive establishment of such bureaucracies. The story I tell here unfolded not in a straightforward context of colonization but as part of a complex economic process in which Britain gained

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the upper hand only after using military force in the First Opium War.61 I argue here, with Aravamudan, for an approach sensitive both to the nuances of  Western engagement with Chinese soundscapes and to the details of the emergence of imperialist regimes of knowledge about them. All the Westerners I discuss who engage with Chinese sound contributed to the development of such regimes, but to different degrees and with different intentions.

Not Yet: Global Historicism Across much of their history Chinese thinkers on music drew musical bound­ aries to make a world where China was always the center.62 This perspective profoundly shaped the experience of Europeans trying to access Chinese musical epistemologies. For instance, even at the moment of the imperial court’s most intense interest in Western music, the Kangxi emperor was persuaded to listen to music only by the Lazarist Teodorico Pedrini, who wrote in the style of Corelli, on the understanding that Western music owed everything to Chinese examples.63 An intellectual history of “listening to China” with global ambitions, then, requires sophisticated tools that can account for multiple perspectives. One such tool is global history, which is beginning to make inroads in historical musicology.64 Sebastian Conrad argues that global history should operate in the field between “perspective” and “process.”65 The argument of this book plays out in such a field. I trace the emergence of particular Western perspectives on the sound of China, formed sometimes in tension with Chinese perspectives, while at the same time engaging with wider “global” processes such the economic entanglement of China and the West. To write a global history is not to write a history of everything. “Global history,” Conrad writes, “is one perspective among others.”66 Indeed, in his 2015 book What Is Global History? Conrad devotes considerable space to the argument that global history is an “ideological prop” for (Western) enthusiasts of contemporary globalization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the very rejection of Eurocentric narratives can create the impression that there is no alternative to the rise of global capitalism.”67 Caution is therefore in order about sweeping claims. What I aim to draw from Conrad’s method­ ology is conscious questioning of  “given” scales of analysis.68 In the case of music history such scales have traditionally been national or, moving the frame outward, centered on Europe or “the West.” My aim is not to write a comprehensive history of Sino-­Western soundscapes that gives equal weight

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to Western and Chinese “sides.” Instead it is to show how Western travelers in China and writers with a stake in Chinese music or sound, or both, defined themselves as Europeans or North Americans in a global context. One strand of this book explores how Chinese sounds featured in this Western imagination. The other strand treats the experience of  Westerners who actually made their way to China. These travelers sometimes reacted to China’s sounds in ways shaped by what they had read. Likewise, the reports they brought home—­for example, from the sonic experience of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792–­94—­in turn shaped perspectives on the sounds and music of China written by those who had never traveled there. Taken as a whole, I tell the story of a feedback loop on a global scale. This feedback loop cannot be separated from larger global processes. One is the Canton trade, which was dominated first by the exporting of tea and other luxury commodities from China to the West, then by the importing of opium from British-­controlled India into China.69 In chapter 2 I show how Westerners listened to the sounds of Canton and, through their musicking, themselves contributed to Canton’s remarkably global soundscapes. These would not have sounded as they did were it not for the coming together of diverse and differentiated groups such as those who gathered on the Pearl River in the interests of trade during the years of what historians call “the Canton System.”70 In this book perspective (the emergence of Western sonic and musical views on China) and process (the role global economic processes played in shaping these views) merge in Canton, where participants in the trade (process) made direct contributions to the writing of newly globalized histories of music (perspectives). These histories of music helped establish methods of approaching Chinese sound worlds that shape musical scholarship today. They were in turn built around another perspective, a telos: the historical movement of music from “primitive” beginnings to a “refined” or civilized present. Western music historians in this period took it for granted that this sonic present represented something to which the whole world should aspire. Thus the second global process I attend to is the emergence in Western music history writing around 1800 of new and more sharply argued theories of progress. These were closely aligned with emerging doctrines of a global economy united by “free trade.” The historical-­methodological position that underpins the belief in progress toward the establishment of Western values as universal is commonly called historicism. Historicism, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, is “the idea that

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to understand anything is to understand it as a unity and its historical de­ velopment.”71 Historicism has always demanded that its followers treat music as a unity. The sovereign subject of historicist musicology is European music, not the world’s musics. Until a few years ago musicologists worked in an elegantly divided field. Music meant Western art music, whose history began somewhere in the European Early Middle Ages and ended somewhere in the European twentieth century. In this history musical practices were always “developing” toward a goal: the European twentieth century. Its sole agents were composers. Their work “pointed at” what came later. The good ones were “ahead” of history. Under the sign of historicism, time flows like a river—­one river—­toward an always better present. In chapter 6 I will argue that the story of the West’s sonic encounter with China around 1800 is a paradigm of the emergence of a “one music, one history” position. The emergence of this perspective led to the degrading of Chinese music to folklore and even noise. That this took place against the backdrop of the rise of European, particularly British, colonial desire toward China is not an accident. In Provincializing Europe Chakrabarty shows how colonial and imperial powers used historicism to structure their interactions with the colonized. An important element of imperialist and colonialist approaches to history, as Chakrabarty and others have written, is the denial of agency to imperial and colonial subjects. The logic of colonialism dictates that colonizers act but the colonized react. “Historicism,” Chakrabarty writes, “came to non-­European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.”72 I argue in this book that writers such as Marx denied agency—­or even the right to consider themselves members of progressive humanity—­to the makers of Chinese music history and musical culture, with profoundly negative consequences for the possibility of a truly global history of sound and music. If non-­Europeans have no agency, they can have no history. Or put another way, in Eurocentric histories of sound, music, and listening, Europe—­ and only Europe—­is the sovereign subject. In Eurocentric histories across all fields, European models are merged with universal ones. Structures of development that are in fact “provincial” become universal.73 Non-­European histories that do not parallel the structures of European counterparts are often judged to be “lacking” something.74 This problem is not limited to music history. Exactly this sense of implied comparison with the West—­that China is missing something—­informs numerous conventional histories of

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early modern and modern China. It has also been assimilated into countless Chinese constructions of Chinese history. Indeed, this kind of conceptual Eurocentrism is not exclusive to studies that are unsympathetic to China. Many sinophile scholars approach modern Chinese history with the intention of understanding what went wrong, of finding out how the West was able to wreak such destruction and humiliation on China in the years after 1839.75 It is beyond question that Western musical practices are deeply naturalized in today’s China, as indeed throughout East Asia. As several writers have noted, Chinese acceptance of Western musical exceptionalism has roots in the early twentieth century.76 Among the “May Fourth” reformers, the young intellectuals in 1920s China who wished to westernize the country in order to defend it from Western and Japanese imperialism, observations such as the one by the composer Ying Shengnang that “in the annals of Chinese music there is no Beethoven or Schubert” were common.77 For those who share this perspective it is logical to frame investigations of the Sino-­Western encounter in music in terms of the “transfer” of Western musical knowledge and practices from West to East.78 This may have happened much earlier. Joyce Lindorff, in her studies of the activities of Christian missionaries at the Chinese imperial court around 1700, is sympathetic to the Chinese point of view. But she is ambivalent about the idea that Western music making, despite the undeniable interest in it called forth in some elite circles, had no lasting effect on musical practices outside the immediate confines of the High Qing political establishment.79 This ambivalence is summed up in the treatment of reports of Kangxi’s supposedly passionate advocacy of  Western music, which, as we have seen, came about only because he believed Western music was an offshoot of a Chinese source. Although he did at times display surprisingly intense interest in the musical worlds his missionary advisers brought with them to Beijing, Western musical practices failed to take hold in China beyond very narrow circles.80 It would be easy to take this story at face value, as an ambiguous encounter in which complex issues of translation, representation, ontology, ideology, and political power come to bear. But we can go further. The “failure” of Western music (and by extension practices of listening) to gain a foothold in High Qing China can be integrated into the narrative of Chinese “failure” to adopt other Western approaches, discourses, or technologies: certain kinds of mathematics or medicine, military strategies, or mechanical inno­ vations. These failures heralded China’s eventual subjugation by the West:

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if only High Qing China (like Japan a century later) had had the foresight to adapt Western perspectives, many catastrophes of Sino-­Western history might have been avoided. Overcoming this “failure narrative” remains one of the great challenges for those attempting to write histories of the Sino-­ Western encounter.81 Western music’s growing success after Western imperialism and colonialism began to have an effect in China suggests that such narratives of failure—­and the accompanying stories of the “triumph” of Western science or music—­can be one-­sided, Eurocentric attempts to obscure what was in fact a violent process of imposition. I offer ways to understand the preconditions of such stories. What processes do they depend on? A central task will be to relate the emergence and reconfiguration of these perspectives to the broad history of the Sino-­ Western encounter in sound. In my analysis the most important element of this history will be the penetration of China by European economic models and the commodification of sound that came with them. In a Chinese context, free trade was never free. The only possible outcome of adopting its doctrines was Western dominance.82 I wish to establish a parallel to sound and music. Liberal models might claim that certain modes of understanding music history have “won out” on a level playing field, just as Western “modernity” has supposedly “won out” in today’s China. If it ever really happened, this victory was not achieved without violence. Indeed, it goes without saying that the playing field of Chinese history from the turn of the nineteenth century onward was anything but level. Thus this book asks, How can Western listening to China around 1800 illu­ minate today’s situation, in which the “universal” values of  Western art music, even if presented as “Sinified,” are widely accepted as such across a wide range of Chinese musical institutions?83 In what ways are the historical contexts of such practices around 1800, in particular the growing pressure exerted on China by Western dogmas of “free trade,” preconditions for this state of affairs? That this encounter—­for the Chinese—­was hardly positive in its immediate (military defeat), middle (quasi-­colonization), and long-­ term outcomes (more than a century of humiliation) seems beyond debate. Does today’s enthusiasm in China for the “universal” values of Western music and westernized sound worlds conceal, or carry within it, relics of this humiliation? It is important to remember, as I will show here, that the overwhelming majority of Chinese listeners around 1800 were utterly uninterested in Western music. This book will reveal something, I hope, about how things could have changed so much since then.

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Between Ethnography and Global Music History A final aim of this book is to explore a disciplinary problem. The history of  Western consideration of non-­Western musical practices is often the pro­­ vince of ethnomusicology, not historical musicology. Indeed, one of the only substantial assessments of the role that information about non-­Western musics played in formations of  Western music history was written thirty years ago by Philip Bohlman.84 The reason is the dramatic indifference of those who write Western music history to non-­Western concerns, grounded in the assumptions of those who, over a century ago, divided music scholarship into subjects proper for music historians and subjects proper for ethnomusicologists. I will argue here that this postulate has its origins not only in Guido Adler’s disposition of the field of Musikwissenschaft into historische and systematische subfields in the late nineteenth century, but in attempts to integrate non-­Western and Western music histories a century before. Today’s disciplinary landscape of music scholarship, I claim, was constituted both by a debate of the late Enlightenment, a period when Westerners tried to define universal “social sciences” in light of voyages of discovery, and by processes of imperial and colonial expansion.85 My approach is very similar to the one adopted by Vanessa Agnew, Olivia Bloechl, and Ana María Ochoa Gaultier for the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Ochoa Gaultier describes musicology, comparative musicology, and comparative linguistics as “disciplines that were forged through the colonial exchange of data and ideas.” The story this book tells of the first attempts by Europeans to write global histories of music that included China offers a further example of a similar phenomenon. Forkel, Marx, and most of all Burney learned about Chinese music history first through French missionaries and then, particularly in Burney’s case, through the channels of Britain’s economic and diplomatic engagement in China. They discovered it was every bit as “learned” and “cultivated” as their own. So the only possible way to retain Europe’s centrality was to change the rules of the historiographical game they were playing. Thus Marx, as I will show in chap­­ ter 6, summarily severed Chinese music from its own history, declaring that it was of interest at most to folklorists and not a fit subject for historians. Once again, a perspective (the hardening of Eurocentric attitudes about Chinese music) and a process (changes in Sino-­Western relations) emerged at the same time. Both are subjects of this book. There is a correlation with the state of relations between music history and ethnomusicology. Even if relegating China’s four-­thousand-­year music history to folklore and later

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ethnomusicology depended on the general fall of China in the estimation of Western thinkers around 1800, it remains a specific result of the fusing of a particular music-­historical narrative by and for Europeans with a concomitant denial of agency to the people who had made Chinese music history for millennia. The arrival of this narrative in the intellectual history of Western music cannot be separated from the historical moment when China became an object of the Western colonial gaze (and ear) and no longer a rival for exemplarity. A key moment in the disciplining of musical scholarship, one that shapes our practice today, unfolded in the shadow of Western colonial and imperial desire. A closer look at specific intersections between imperial and colonial history, postcolonial theory, and music historiography can clarify current debates about the proper objects and methods of music scholarship. In the past twenty years or so musicologists and ethnomusicologists have been working their way toward each other. A notable result has been the proposition that music history needs more ethnomusicology.86 The root of the alienation of the two disciplines, some claim (as I would like to claim in this book, but with a different emphasis), lies in the specific conditions of late eighteenth-­century Europe. Gary Tomlinson argued nearly two decades ago in his essay “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” now widely antholo­ gized, that in the late eighteenth century Europeans’ insistence on the supe­ riority of “literate” Western genres fed a redefinition of the concept of “music” itself.87 Eighteenth-­century thinkers separated music from language while at the same time noting that both were linked to writing.88 Following Tomlinson, Bloechl argues that “Enlightenment writers . . . commonly held Europe’s literate modernity and removed it from their own and other peoples’ ‘song’ (or sometimes in cruder terms ‘noise’).”89 Historical musicology got to keep “literate modernity.” Apart from the sound/noise quandary I have already discussed. China is a problem here. As Western historians around 1800 were well aware, Chinese culture was most certainly literate and had been so far longer than Europe. Tomlinson and his followers are correct that Western writers—­Tomlinson’s example is Forkel, who will play a role here—­identified literacy as a key indicator of musical cultivation, and that they used the presence or absence of written systems to establish a given music’s worthiness for sustained scholarly attention by music historians.90 Equally, it is absolutely clear that the result was the assigning of whole swaths of  Western vernacular music and the entirety of non-­Western music to another discipline (folklore and later ethnomusicology). Tomlinson’s account of the origins of the division

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of European musical scholarship into historical and ethnographic branches has been taken up in equally influential statements by Nicholas Cook and then Georgina Born.91 Cook argues that the border between historical and ethnographic methods needs to be completely overcome. His claim turns on the insight that, if the main object of musical expression is performance, then methods made for interpreting texts are not sufficient.92 In a sense Cook argues here for a return to perspectives common in the late eighteenth century, in which a split between the two methods was not as evident. Born, a sociologist, picks up on Tomlinson’s argument and traces how musicology as traditionally conceived has constituted itself in light of its differences from imagined “others,” for example, nonliterate musical practices.93 Although Born is aware that such others seem always to line up on the non-­Western end of the West/non-­West binary, for her as for Cook and Tomlinson the traditional canon of historical methods based on writing seem to have run its course. The title of Cook’s essay proclaims that “we are all (ethno)musicologists now.”94 Where does this leave China, a literate musical nation par excellence? When I started to write this book I soon discovered that the history of Chinese music was not the subject of much historical musicology, particularly in English.95 In light of China’s long musical history, I found this surprising. Yet more surprising is that the well-­documented Western interaction with this history, primarily on the part of Catholic missionaries at the imperial court in Beijing, seems mostly to be studied from the perspective of the transfer of Western ideas toward China and not of Chinese ideas toward the West.96 The thinness of the literature in European languages on Chinese music history in general and the Sino-­Western musical encounter in the eighteenth century more specifically contrasts sharply with a large and growing ethnomusicological literature on China. A recent search of the RILM database of scholarly writing on music revealed that of 12,095 hits for the search terms “China” and “history” only 1,402 do not also include the words “traditional” or a variant of  “ethnomusicology.”97 I wondered if this could be attributed to Tomlinson’s split between literate and nonliterate musical cultures. Reading his analysis, one might conclude that the first universal historians of Western music simply wrote off Chinese music as uncultivated and uninteresting, consigning it to the (for them) less prestigious position of folklore. As I will argue, by the 1830s precisely this had happened in relation to China. Yet it is also clear that European intellectuals from the early modern era onward were well aware of—­ and, at least earlier, in many cases were awed by—­China’s obvious cultiva-

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tion and long history, also in music.98 As I will show in chapter 1, even Jean-­ Philippe Rameau—­surely an avatar of musical “cultivation”—­imagined China to be kind of musical-­intellectual paradise where musicians lived, as he did, from the magic of the corps sonore. Western music historians eventually excluded Chinese music history from their global narratives. But they did so only after an engagement that lasted decades, and in awareness of China’s long literate history. What we need to achieve, then, in the spirit of a more nuanced intellectual history, is a new understanding that the Sino-­ Western encounter in sound ended not in Western dismissal of China but in a gradual process of “reading past”—­or perhaps better, “listening past.” In this book I build on discussions like Tomlinson’s, which offer a broad-­ brush picture of the history of Eurocentrism in music, toward a more complex account of encounters that were at once local and global. In fact, many of the objects of study that Western music historians around 1800 concerned themselves with, including Islamic, Indian, and Chinese music, were musically alphabetic (if “alphabetism” is taken to mean using written notation to capture and preserve musical practices). Tomlinson’s division may be heuristically useful: perspectives on Chinese music, and Chinese sound worlds in general around 1800, were surely shaped by Western arrogance. But those who thought and acted in light of these perspectives did so at the same time as they participated in, and were shaped by, globally scaled processes such as Sino-­Western political crises and the gradual unraveling of the Canton System. A second point of my engagement with ethnomusicology has to do with method. At the core of Tomlinson’s argument is the idea that to separate the world’s music into cultivated musics with histories and uncultivated ones without them is to separate writing from practice. Tomlinson’s laudable goal was to challenge the colonialist border between musical traditions based on writing and those passed down in other ways and shaped by other value systems. The consequence of this separation would be reweighting objects of musical study away from prestigious, canonical, and cultivated forms of music and toward vernacular, “oral” repertoires.99 A central aspect of his argument was (and is) that musicology as a discipline ought to concern itself less with text and discourse and more with practice. This is also Cook’s and Born’s point. Discussions around the existence, real or imagined, of  “the music itself ” beyond social practices precipitated decades of institutional change in historical musicology, not all of it easy.100 The methodological consequence—­ supported by interventions like those of  Tomlinson, Cook, and Born—­was

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a turn from text-­centered methods such as “positivist” philology, analysis, and hermeneutics toward experience-­based methods such as ethnographic fieldwork. Yet enthusiasm for an (overdue) revolution in how we do our disciplinary business can block our historical sight lines. As I will argue, neither Burney nor Forkel subscribed to a theory of music history in which “the music itself ” was the only driver. Both thought they could recognize music history’s agency in “progress” toward the right mixture of horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic and contrapuntal) forms of musical expression. But Burney and Forkel were keenly interested in how and why people were able to discover new ways to achieve such a music. The real disciplinary change, I would argue, came some time later, for instance, in the work of A. B. Marx. Marx shared the framework his predecessors used but—­under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy—­simplified the question of agency. For him the music historian’s role was to uncover the emergence of a musical World Spirit striving toward more perfect knowledge of itself. This was in turn read by Marx’s followers to mean progress toward more perfect knowledge of the innate potential of musical materials within a certain tonal/harmonic system.101 To return to the language of global history: Burney, Forkel, and Marx brought a perspective to music scholarship in the West. This perspective depended on a growing sense of the superiority of a particular kind of Western music. Marx made this perspective absolute by denying music-­historical agency to non-­Western peoples. This is a view that shapes our own: one need only look at the continuing institutional emphasis on studying China from the perspective of ethnomusicology, a discipline that was originally conceived as synchronic (or “systematic”). Thanks to the global reach of Western musical institutions in both practice and scholarship, such perspectives now enjoy unparalleled global prestige, even hegemony. In the spirit of  Tamara Levitz’s call for a “musicology beyond borders” this book asks about the history of some of the early processes behind the emergence of this hegemony.102 To understand these processes is to understand how we have arrived at today’s perspectives. Perhaps the answer to the problem of the division of musical scholarship into historical and ethnographic objects of study is not (only) more ethnomusicology but (also) more history.

one

China and the Enlightened Ear

D

Global Enlightenment

id eighteenth-­c entury europe give birth to the modern world? For some “the Enlightenment” figures as the rational­ ist, secular, and emancipatory intellectual movement without which there could have been no modernity.1 The movement originated in Europe and spread across the globe.2 Others disagree: for them the Enlightenment was the first step in the Western imperial and colonial project that was at fault for the inequalities and injustices of our global present.3 The assertion that Enlightenment values were universal, such critics argue, empowered Europeans to intervene to implement them. Historian Sebastian Conrad writes that Europe interfered with the rest of the world “also by force, un­ der the auspices of a paternalistic civilising mission,” aware of the danger of eliminating “alternative world views.” The Enlightenment’s dark side, he concludes, “has sharpened our sensibility for the asymmetrical structures of exchange.”4 Either way, Europe is the actor and the rest of the world the “acted upon.” The West has a history, the “rest” has no agency. One answer to such Euro­ centrism is to “provincialize” the European experience.5 A provincial Eu­ ropean Enlightenment is just one in a network of largely unrelated global enlightenments shaping the global present.6 Other intellectual historians—­ following the “global turn” in history—­have begun instead to concentrate on how the Enlightenment traveled through networks of translators and other intermediaries spread across the world by war, trade, missionary activity, co­­ lonial expansion, scientific exploration, luxury travel (“Grand Tours”), or a mixture of them all.7 The knowledge they gathered reached public audi­ ences as texts filtered through networks such as the “republic of letters” and the nascent “public sphere” in early modern Europe.8 Global intellectual

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history considers the topography of such networks, including the feedback loops that emerge when texts about one place are received in another place and then return to readers in their place of origin. A global intellectual his­ tory of the eighteenth century—­in the West the century of the Enlight­­ enment—­unfolds within the circulation of ideas and the production of knowledge, and under the sign of contact, exchange, and conflict.9 Such in­ teractions not only were a product of the Enlightenment, they made it what it was. Was musical thought in the Enlightenment West “co-­constituted” by encounters with non-­European others? A few decades ago the question might have seemed absurd. Nothing seemed to sum up the West’s singu­ lar accomplishments more than its enlightened composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and the idiom in which they wrote their works.10 Of course the global success of  Western elite music cannot be doubted. Particularly in East Asia, “classical music” is widely celebrated as a badge of cosmopoli­ tanism and modernity. But this success has a particular history. Building on accounts of early modern and eighteenth-­century musical encounter by Vanessa Agnew, David Irving, Jürgen Osterhammel, and others, this chap­ ter argues that key moments of Enlightenment musical thought were chal­ lenged, illuminated, and indeed co-­constituted by the Western encounter with—­in this case—­Chinese sounds.11 Around 1700 China loomed large in the European imagination.12 From the late 1600s onward China came to Europe in a flood of consumer goods. These were objects that Europeans could taste and smell (tea), touch (tex­ tiles), and see (porcelain).13 Indeed, the only sense Chinese products did not normally appeal to was hearing. At the same time the flow to Europe of writing about China intensified, primarily generated by Christian mission­ aries at the Qing imperial court. These writings focused on strategies for converting China to Catholicism.14 By the first decades of the eighteenth century the Jesuit practice of accommodating Catholic liturgy to Chinese rites became a matter of bitter dispute in Beijing, Rome, and Paris.15 The quarrel exploded into the so-­called Rites Controversy, which was settled finally in a 1704 papal bull, in which Clement XI forbade the Jesuits to tol­­ erate any “native” Chinese practices in Catholic religious observance. The flood of words that accompanied the Rites Controversy—­which focused mainly on the Jesuit contention that Chinese Confucianism was a kind of unconscious Christianity—­did little to help Europeans understand how China sounded or, perhaps more to the point, how China might be bet­ ter understood through the ear. Nonetheless the sound of China, and the

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role the sense of hearing might play in Chinese civilization—­a civilization many writers at the time saw as equal or in some cases superior to that of the West—­appears at important junctures in the writing of key thinkers such as Christian Wolff,  Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In these writings a pattern emerges. Across much of the century, Euro­ pean writers were happy to imagine China’s soundscapes—­and the sound­ scapes of the entire globe—­as broadly compatible with those in Europe. Yet at century’s end this cosmopolitanism gave way to recognition of global sonic diversity and a radical othering of Chinese sounds. Attitudes toward Chinese soundscapes—­of language, for instance, but also of music—­changed profoundly around 1800. This change was driven by larger intellectual forces, but not necessarily the general decline of China’s prestige in the European imagination. I argue that a key to understanding the othering of Chinese soundscapes is an eighteenth-­century revolution in thinking, in the West, about how the senses make humans what they are. This revolution began in a reciprocal process that brought together the Anglo-­Scots “science of man,” the work of the Encyclopedists in France, and the “new anthropol­ ogy” of the late German Enlightenment.16 Its result was the end of the pre­ vious consensus that human senses were essentially the same everywhere. The “new anthropology” turned on the idea that culture (a term that first began to be used about this time) depended on anatomy and anatomically driven responses to the biological and geological environment.17 In the case at hand the result was the detachment—­from a Western perspective—­of Chinese listening from Western listening. This “new anthropology” ended a Sino-­Western conversation about sound and music. Earlier, Western rationalists such as Christian Wolff and Jean-­ Philippe Rameau had thought about sound as part of a system of wider correspondences between humans and the natural world. Their writings re­ veal parallels with a particularly Chinese intellectual entwining of mathe­ matics, acoustics, ethics, and music theory.18 As a result, what such Western philosophers learned about Chinese approaches to sound made some sense to them. These commonalities made something like intellectual exchange about these matters possible on a global scale. “New anthropologists” such as Rousseau and Herder took a different tack. Rousseau drew attention to significant national (or “cultural”) differences in taste. Herder went fur­ ther and suggested that different peoples had different senses. This allowed him to form value judgments about which peoples might have superior “na­ tional” taste based on what later generations would call “racial” difference.

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Second, the detachment of hearing from the other senses engendered new ideas about the difference between music and sound. Listening (the per­ ception of sound) and musicking (making or receiving music) became sepa­ rate activities.19 Herder in particular is credited with proposing a new view of language and cultural difference that made possible whole swaths of today’s “human sciences,” especially the new disciplines of anthropology and ethnography.20 For Herder each nation has different senses, and the senses make culture. The consequence is that each nation or Volk is defined by its sensory history. In the contest of history some peoples win and others lose. Herder him­ self was respectful and indeed enthusiastic about folk music of all origins, and he did much to establish the idea that each people had its own music and that these musics should not be judged against each other.21 But the emergence of cultural difference as a context for hearing made new kinds of value judgment unavoidable. In the wake of the “new anthropology” as expounded by Herder and others, many writers on aesthetics, the Enlighten­ ment science of value judgment in art, ran into difficulties with difference: of taste between individuals, of categories such as style across history, and of both taste and style across the globe. Earlier observers such as Rousseau would have spoken of such difference as being rooted in “morals.” But es­ pecially after Herder, a common response was to explain difference using concepts such as “civilization” or “culture.” One could speak of a historical culture—­the culture of the ancient Egyptians—­or of a faraway one (the Chinese). Both peoples heard differently, and this difference could be plot­ ted on historical axes. Cultures of listening could rise and fall.

Christian Wolff and the Sound of China’s “Practical Wisdom” On July 12, 1721, Christian Wolff, professor of philosophy and Prorektor or ranking academic of the University of Halle, gave his farewell address af­ ter a one-­year term. Its title was “Oratio de sinarum philosophia practica” (Oration on the practical philosophy of the Chinese).22 Drawing on Je­ suit writings, Wolff spoke of Chinese ethical and moral achievement.23 The Chinese, he argued, offered a shining example of how to live wisely, even without access to the Christian religion or a personal relationship with God. Their “natural religion,” drawn from canonical writings like the Four Books and the Six Classics, showed them how to live exemplary, harmonious lives by following basic principles such as filial piety and rational govern­ ment. Indeed, the Chinese concept of the emperor as the benevolent head

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of a large family could serve as a model for other large empires, including the Holy Roman Empire of which Halle and Prussia were a part.24 The im­ age of the emperor as father could also be a metaphor, Wolff claimed, for the balanced roles of the intellect (the ruler) and the senses (the ruled).25 Wolff ’s intervention was a grave provocation to his successor, theolo­ gian Joachim Lange. Lange was a leading light of Pietism; he believed re­ demption was available only through Christ and Christian practice.26 The resulting scandal shook the university. After the “Oratio” appeared in print two years later, the controversy turned national.27 On Lange’s advice King Friedrich Wilhelm dismissed Wolff from his post and ordered him to leave Prussia, threatening to have him hanged if he did not comply. Wolff fled to a chair at Marburg in Hesse. The affair, which dragged on for years, did no harm to Wolff ’s career. When he died in 1754, four years after a trium­ phant return to his old position in Halle, he was universally regarded as Ger­­ many’s leading philosopher. In the peroration of the “Oratio” Wolff explains how the Chinese lead morally blameless lives. “In previous eras,” he writes, “when the Chinese empire was in highest bloom [höchster Blüte] no pregnant woman would have dared to contemplate dangerous matters or listen to immoral words.” Indeed, Wolff goes on, in the houses of the elite a music master was re­ tained to sing particular odes on the subject of the correct moral behavior to its pregnant residents “with the intention that a child would be born who would distinguish himself through his talents.” His listeners must be aware, he continues, of the significant correspondence between “body and spirit.”28 Musical sounds transmitted to the unborn children of the elite underpin the moral foundations of Chinese society. In the land where the philosopher is king and kings are philosophers, the sense of hearing makes all the difference. This is an extraordinary intervention. First, as his opponents suspected, Wolff proposes that moral improvement is possible without salvation through Christ. Indeed, the Chinese might not even need salvation, because it is possible to be born “wise” and “good” in China if one has heard the right music in utero. Second, unlike previous European thinkers—­from the an­ cient Egyptians and Greeks up to Athanasius Kircher—­who had made claims for music that depended on the correspondences of numeric struc­ tures in its materials and the wider universe, Wolff argues that music can improve human morals directly through its effects on the complex bio­ logical systems of pregnancy. Wolff ’s medicalizing and embodiment of the abstract relation between good sounds and good behavior reflects, in the

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spirt of his larger project, a commitment to replacing both Christ-­centered (Aristotelian) philosophies of experience and Neoplatonic epistemologies of correspondence with a modern system of natural law based on the senses. Third, such a sensory experience does not require words. The sounds in Wolff ’s anecdote do not improve ethical makeup by helping the child un­ derstand specific texts: How could an unborn child understand them? They work directly instead, strengthening moral fiber by making the develop­ ing brain more receptive to “certain forms of ideas” than to others. Finally, Wolff ’s reception of Chinese philosophy departs from the usual investiga­ tions of China, inspired by comparisons with ancient Greece and Egypt, that place China at a historical distance. Wolff presents China as a fully “modern” mirror to Europe. In this alternative society the senses, particu­ larly hearing, set the moral tone. When it comes to music and listening, Wolff is usually associated with the strict mimetic approach of his student and supporter Johann Christoph Gottsched, who in turn drew on French theorists such as Charles Batteaux to intervene in disputes over the relation between words and music in op­ era. Gottsched claimed that “music without words lacks a soul and is in­ comprehensible.”29 Yet Wolff ’s auditory turn in the “Oratio” makes room for music without words and thus anticipates many of the issues raised by Enlightenment music aesthetics. He argues from a rationalist position: the right sounds (alone, no words are involved) are the “grounds” or sufficient causes of correct moral behavior in those fortunate enough to hear them. In addition, the idea that sound can work directly on the bodies of mother and child is strikingly empiricist, foreshadowing the “new anthropology.” Instead of fearing the unpredictable effects of textless music as Gottsched did, or even doubting its overall utility in the manner of his French con­ temporary Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle (who famously asked, “Sonata, what do you want from me?”), Wolff allows sound to work on sense, even without a text, and to play a crucial role in a world whose many moving parts all work together. This is not merely a philosophical exercise. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century Germans in the thousands took to musical practices reflecting the idea that sound and sense could make them better people. Of the eccentric writer and political dissident Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, an anonymous critic wrote that “it was at the piano that he often felt what a blessing it was to be totally aware of his humanity.”30 Many used music to explore new ways to live more ethical lives, because they believed

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that sound—­sometimes with a text, sometimes without—­could put them in touch with what it means to be fully human. The vehicle many of them chose was the strophic song. These simple pieces for voice and keyboard, some with religious texts, others secular, were widely disseminated through­ out the German-­speaking world in an era of explosive growth in the con­ sumption of printed music. More than twenty thousand of these songs were published as sheet music, and thousands more appeared as supplements in nonmusical publications.31 Such consumption and performance in countless prosperous households in Germany and beyond makes them as important a component of eighteenth-­century European music history as traditionally more prestigious genres such as opera and instrumental music. Laurenz Lütteken has written that this middle-­class discovery of powerful inner worlds through music allowed Europeans to rethink their musical prac­ tices from the ground up. The notion that a simple melody could embody a moral concept paved the way for the idea that a musical performer—­or a composer, improvising at the keyboard, for instance—­could transmit such concepts directly in sound, unifying (in twentieth-­century terms) medium and message without the mediation of text or “rules.”32 The unborn child in Wolff ’s Chinese parable illustrates exactly the same process. It would be a step too far to argue that German music of the mid-­ eighteenth century was directly influenced by Chinese perspectives. But a global framing of enlightenment does not require direct lines of influence. Wolff ’s placing his understanding of Chinese music at so prominent a place in one of his most widely read texts shows how Chinese ideas, filtered through translation and circulated in the public sphere, could resonate in Enlighten­ ment Europe. The resonance was all the louder because in the early decades of the eighteenth century the notion that good musicking can make a per­ son more moral was in the air.33 Indeed, many important episodes in the intellectual history of music in the West, going back to ancient times, had revolved around such ideas. Wolff was certainly the most prominent, and most widely read, academic philosopher of his generation, in the German lands and beyond. The “Oratio de sinarum philosophia practica” was surely one of his most celebrated texts. It makes a difference that in it he reached directly for a Chinese example and thus indirectly reached out to the Chi­ nese, a few of whom may even, via the small European missionary commu­ nity in Beijing, have become aware of his argument. In Wolff ’s “Oratio,” Chinese notions of music and morals “co-­constitute” European ones. This is how musical enlightenment worked on a global scale.

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Rameau Meets Confucius Wolff ’s idea that sense and intellect work together anywhere found a musi­ cal voice in the composer and theorist Jean-­Philippe Rameau. At two junc­ tures in his career Rameau turned to non-­Western music. In 1725, a delega­ tion of Native Americans visited Paris and were presented to Louis XV.34 Members of the group also performed as dancers at the Théâtre italien, and Rameau was in the audience. Three years later he composed a short work for keyboard called Les sauvages (1728). Here he tried, as he put it, to “characterize” what he had experienced at the theater.35 But he did so in his own musical idiom, peppered in this case with asymmetrical phrasing and unusual melodic leaps.36 In other words, Les sauvages does not draw on transcriptions of North American music or any other non-­European music, some of which would have already been available to Europeans. Instead it imagines North American dancers in a (mainly) familiar musical voice. In 1735 Rameau made a similar attempt to engage with non-­European sounds in his opera-­ballet Les Indes galants, which included musical material from Les sauvages. In additional material Rameau composed his “Indians”—­in the ballet they are North Americans, Persians, Turks, and Peruvians—­the same way he had in Les sauvages. Les Indes galants sounds like Rameau’s other works except perhaps for rougher melodies and unusual phrase lengths.37 Capturing an “authentic” non-­Western voice might have seemed to Ra­ meau to be irrelevant, since he was convinced, as we shall see, that all the world’s people must have the same basic musical sensibilities. His goal was to somehow convert the real experience he had in the Théâtre italien into music that listeners in Paris might understand. Les Indes galants, Sebastian Klotz argues, demonstrates Rameau’s commitment to his own brand of en­­ lightened universalism. Rameau’s strategy was to “accommodate alterna­ tive versions of human sociality and render them familiar for the West.”38 Rameau brought the same universalism to his work as a music theorist. As early as the 1720s, with the Traité de l’harmonie, he began an ambitious program of demonstrating how the fundamental bass was a general princi­ ple of nature, true at all times and in all places.39 Rameau’s harmonic system derived from the corps sonore, the “sounding body” that generated the over­ tone series. Leading French thinkers such as Condillac, Diderot, the young Rousseau, and above all Jean Le Rond d’Alembert initially welcomed Ra­ meau’s forays into natural philosophy. The composer even earned a posi­ tive reference in the “Discours préliminaire” of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.40 But in the late 1750s, after Rameau took exception to the Encyclopédie’s musical

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articles, d’Alembert had turned vehemently against the older theorist.41 D’Alembert thought Rameau should stick to music and leave speculation about nature and science to a new generation of specialists, among whom he counted himself. Rameau, who wanted his claims to resonate beyond the limited field of music, resented the interference of the musical amateur d’Alembert. Rameau’s tendency to take any criticism poorly and his rapid publication tempo fueled their dispute.42 Rameau found a supporter in faraway China: the Jesuit Jean-­Jo­­seph-­ Marie Amiot, who arrived in China in 1751, spent the rest of his long life in Beijing, and died there in 1793.43 The bulk of his career unfolded after the col­ lapse of  Jesuit influence in Europe following the Rites Controversy and the eventual shutting down of the order from 1759 to 1767. The suppression of the Jesuits, however, had little effect on Amiot’s career. From a Chinese perspective he was primarily an official of the Qing court who incidentally represented a foreign set of beliefs. As long as he performed his duties to the emperor he was treated the same way, in theory, as any Chinese or Man­­ chu civil servant. From this privileged “insider” position Amiot served the European reading public much as his predecessors had, writing texts that circulated in Europe on a wide variety of Chinese issues. In 1754 Amiot sent back to Paris a manuscript translation of a treatise on music written by the neo-­Confucianist scholar and high imperial official Li Guangdi in the early 1700s.44 It soon found its way to Rameau. Rameau, in turn, cited Li on the first page of the appendix to his 1760 treatise Code de musique pratique, the “Nouvelles réflexions sur le corps sonore.” Rameau begins with a grand gesture: The principle of everything is one: this is a truth among all humankind who use thought and sentiment, and [even] those who do not have knowl­­ edge. Convinced of the necessity of this universal principle, the first phi­ losophers looked for it in music: Pythagoras, following the Egyptians, applied the laws of harmony to the movement of the planets; Plato had it ruling over the makeup of the soul; Aristotle, his disciple, after having said that music is a celestial and divine thing, added that the prin­­ciple of the world system was found in it.45

Here Rameau places a footnote that leads to China, referencing Amiot’s translation of Li’s treatise and showing that the Chinese had calculated division of the octave into twelve parts using the triple progression “to the thirteenth term.”46 For Rameau this proves the Chinese had discovered

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“his” corps sonore. Thus his harmonic theory was more than simply a guide to good practice. It was a system of universal truths—­in the sense, for ex­ ample, of “modern” Newtonian physics—­and proof that musical expres­ sion everywhere reflected these truths. Later in the “Nouvelles réflexions” Rameau uses transcriptions of scales from Li’s treatise and some musical examples from Jean-­Baptiste Du Halde’s encyclopedia of China to dem­ onstrate that real Chinese music can be made to conform to the theory of the fundamental bass.47 Of course Rameau was absolutely wrong about how Chinese music worked in practice: Chinese musical traditions do not in­ clude harmony in a way Rameau would have accepted. There was, how­ ever, a long history of argument about the proper division of the octave into twelve parts: this is what Rameau recognized as parallel with his own thinking.48 Intellectual exchange does not require that each side understand the other. What is interesting is how Rameau draws Chinese ideas into central de­ bates about music theory in Enlightenment France. Rameau uses Chinese sources the same way he uses Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. If music theory in classical antiquity “co-­constitutes” Rameau’s notion of the corps sonore, then so must Chinese theory. The nature of the network leading from Beijing to Paris makes this clearer. Amiot’s position as an imperial of­ ficial required him to dress as a Chinese scholar would, learn the language, and serve the emperor as an official member of the imperial establishments devoted to mathematics, astronomy, and music.49 From a Chinese perspec­ tive, Amiot spoke not as a European but as a Chinese person. Li Guangdi, who died some decades before Amiot reached Beijing, had in turn been neither an ordinary musician nor an insignificant member of the Chinese intellectual world. In the 1680s he served as chancellor of the Hanlin Acad­ emy, China’s uppermost elite educational and scholarly institution. Later he was grand secretary to the Kangxi emperor, in daily contact with the sover­ eign and controlling written and personal access to him.50 In this capacity he supported retaining the Jesuits as scientific advisers at the imperial court even as Kangxi began to suppress Christian missionary activities in the wake of the Rites Controversy. Li’s close association with Jesuits employed by the Qing to study mathematics, astronomy, and music means that his work already reflected decades of Sino-­Western interaction in Beijing.51 On the French side the intermediaries were similarly prestigious. Amiot origi­ nally sent his translation, and a series of manuscripts on various subjects that followed, to Jean-­Pierre de Bougainville, permanent secretary of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-­lettres and a member of the Académie

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française. Bougainville in turn passed Amiot’s work on in his own circles, which included noted authorities on music such as Abbé François Arnaud and his fellow scholar the music historian Abbé Pierre-­Joseph Roussier.52 The interest in Chinese music aesthetics that members of such circles showed might be explained by resonances they would have recognized with influential strands of Enlightenment thought. This brings us back to Wolff. Neo-­Confucian orthodoxy emphasized music’s power to structure human behavior. “For moving the moral climate and changing customs,” Li wrote, “there is nothing better than music.”53 This sentiment parallels Rameau’s conviction that musical expression is more than an empirically verifiable process. As David Cohen has put it, it is a “benevolent, virtually divine force or entity.”54 Both Rameau’s position and its Chinese counterparts corre­ spond with a wide swath of eighteenth-­century thought about how divin­ ity reveals itself in nature to the point of extreme diffusion. The idea that “God” might be more a universal natural presence than an agent is clearly Wolffian.55 It is also—­as Wolff discovered when he had to flee Halle in fear for his life—­clearly deist, or even Spinozist. And the latter philosophy, which came close to denying the existence of God, lay beyond the capacity for forgiveness of all but the most tolerant eighteenth-­century Europeans. Shortly before his death in 1754, Wolff had returned in triumph to his old chair in Halle on the accession to the Prussian throne of the philosophi­ cal Frederick II. It turns out that Wolff himself was familiar with Rameau’s theories and even corresponded with him.56 Cynthia Verba presents the composer-­theorist’s battles with opponents like d’Alembert as a struggle be­­tween old-­fashioned Cartesianism and a newer commitment to empiri­ cal science.57 Rameau thus comes across as a conservative in conflict with the more “progressive” Encyclopedists. What if Rameau, using Chinese ma­ terials, was after something more up-­to-­date than old-­school rationalism, his ear attuned to something more radical than d’Alembert could counte­ nance? Thomas Christensen suggests that Rameau was an “occasionalist,” that is, a follower of the radical philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, and be­ lieved that nature’s harmonic order had been set in motion by a benevo­ lent God who worked according to “general laws.”58 Rameau’s recourse to China—­his nearness to Wolff is a clue—­actually goes one step further.59 By implying that musical thinkers in China (none of them Christian) rec­ ognized the general laws of harmony, Rameau leaves behind the Christian God—­and the Christian foundations of music theory. It is only a short distance from this position to a Spinozist-­pantheist and even atheist music theory. D’Alembert’s deist Newtonianism, which fudges the question of

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the unity of God and nature, looks tame and conservative by comparison. Concerning Chinese music, Rameau was more radical. In his appropriation of Chinese musical thought to make a universalist point (“the principle of everything is one”), Rameau travels down the path Wolff had already taken, with all the universalism—­and implied doubt about received religion—­that entails.

Egypt and China The primary protagonists of the discussion on Chinese music in midcen­ tury Paris were less interested in such philosophical adventures, even when they veered into territory where the stakes were so high. They concentrated instead on origins, particularly the relative historical relation between Egypt (Europe’s “remotest” direct ancestor) and China. They scrutinized the flood of information emerging from missionary scholars in Beijing for signs that the two countries were somehow related, particularly after Joseph de Guignes suggested that China had actually been a colony of Egypt and that Chinese characters were versions of Egyptian hieroglyphs.60 By the 1750s intellectuals were fighting pitched battles over which society was older. Amiot’s manuscript reports on Chinese music were taken as evidence for de Guignes’s position, particularly by the music historian Pierre Roussier, a Rameau supporter well known in Parisian circles. Roussier seized on Ami­ ot’s observations about similarities between Chinese and ancient Greek music theory. He claimed that the five-­note scale the Chinese used was an “imperfect” relic of a superior Egyptian practice.61 When news of this claim reached Amiot in Beijing several years later, he was irritated. Some twenty years after his first manuscript contributions on Chinese music arrived in Paris, Amiot produced a substantial original work, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois (1779), which was published again in 1780 as volume 6 of a mul­ tivolume survey of Chinese history and society based on Jesuit reports, the Mémoires concernant [les] Chinois (1776–­1814).62 Although Amiot tries to set the record straight about Egypt, his objections to Roussier’s historical theory come across as somewhat muted.63 Unfortunately for Amiot, the volume’s editor was Roussier himself. Roussier’s editing, however, did not obscure Amiot’s attempt to engage with Rameau’s claim that Chinese music theory confirms the universality of the corps sonore. Toward the end of the Mémoire, Amiot addresses whether the Chinese know counterpoint and harmony. His answer is oblique: Chi­ nese music does have harmony, he claims; indeed, the “Chinese could be

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the nation who know harmony the best, and universally ob­­serve its laws.”64 But these laws of harmony are metaphorical: “[They consist] of a general agreement [un accord général] between physical, moral, and political things and those that constitute religion and government; [the word] chord in the [Chinese] science of sounds is neither representation nor image.”65 The words accord général seem carefully chosen, as if to draw readers’ at­ tention to Rameau’s ideas about the universality of harmonic principles by playing with the slippage between two meanings of accord: “agreement” and “chord.” Amiot then explores evidence for this claim. For the Chinese, he writes, music is “nothing but a kind of language that serves people by expressing the sentiments with which they are affected.  .  .  . [T]he consequence is that music, in order to be good, should display the passions it is meant to express.”66 As a musically educated European, Amiot knew that the idea that music is a kind of language of the emotions was a central tenet of al­­ most every music-­aesthetic theory of the European Enlightenment. Hav­ ing built this bridge, Amiot goes on to demonstrate how the Chinese use certain changes in tone color and duration to represent emotions (“such changes are employed for this purpose”).67 He is describing not harmony in the technical sense (more than one voice sounding together) but harmony between musical parameters and what they are meant to express. Finally, he suggests that Chinese harmony is also harmony between all the aspects of a musical performance and its expressive content: Tones are like words in the language of music; modulations are its phrases. Voices, instruments, and dances make up the context and totality of dis­ course. When we wish to express what we feel, we employ, among our words, sounds that are high or low, deep or high-­pitched, strong or weak, fast or slow, short or of [longer] duration. If the pitches are regulated by the lu [the Chinese division of the octave into distinct pitches]; if the instruments support the voice and [sound with it] neither too early nor too late; if all of the eight sorts of sounds [in Chinese music theory there are eight sounding materials] are made into notes that suit them and employed only when it is proper; if the dancers, in all their attitudes and movements, tell the eyes what the voices and instruments tell the ears; if he who performs the ceremonies in honor of heaven, or of the ancestors, shows, through the seriousness of his countenance, through which all Chinese music is maintained, that he has truly penetrated the sentiments he expresses, and the song and the dances, this is the most perfect accord,

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this is true harmony. We have never known anything other than this, or otherwise.68

Thus Amiot delivers a theory of music’s intersection with other media calculated to evoke maximum recognition from anyone familiar with cur­ rent discussions about verisimilitude in Western opera and, more broadly, the relation of music to language. In particular, Amiot’s assertions that—­in the name of  harmony—­instrumental music must support the voice, that cer­ tain tone colors must be employed only “when it is proper,” and that the dancers must “tell the eyes what the voices and instruments tell the ears” are claims made widely in European music criticism of the era. These are summed up in Luigi Calzabigi’s preface (written in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s name) to the libretto of their opera Alceste, which was to become celebrated as one of their first “reform operas.”69 The preface argues for a “return” to “beautiful simplicity” (bella simplicità) in order to free music drama from the excesses of performers and the negligence of composers, who had made the genre “pompous,” “ridiculous,” and “boring.” The tools for the job, Gluck/Calzabigi argued, included “design well-­disposed to the vivacity of colors” and “well-­chosen contrasts of light and shadow.” Of course it is impossible to know for certain if this exact text made it to Amiot in Beijing before he sent the manuscript of the Mémoire to Paris. But the “harmony” Amiot describes in it seems to resonate strongly with the inten­ tions outlined in the Alceste preface. Amiot’s wider definition of “harmony” was also clearly intended to take up Rameau’s idea in the “Nouvelles réflexions” about the universality of harmonic laws. But perhaps Amiot knew that Chinese music as it actually sounded would not have had much in common with the universal music Rameau imagined. So in his reply, which took two decades to arrive, he shifted attention to more current European concerns about how music and drama ought to interact. Either way, by describing Chinese music in terms familiar to his Western readers, Amiot acted as an intermediary between Chinese musical thought—­which depends on a linkage between musical harmony and the harmony that enables a state or dynasty to prosper—­and both Rameau’s theory of sounding bodies and Gluck and Calzabigi’s pro­ posals for the reform of opera. If Rameau appears obliquely in the counterpoint chapter of Amiot’s Mémoire, in the opening of the book his music sounds directly. Here Amiot describes how, when he first arrived in China, he would often make use of

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his own “modest talents” as a flutist and keyboard player. The results, how­ ever, were not as he expected. “Les sauvages, Les cyclopes, the most beauti­ ful sonatas, the most melodious airs for the flute, and the most virtuosic from Blavet’s collection, nothing of this made the least impression on the Chinese.”70 When Amiot asked a Chinese colleague why he thought Euro­ peans and Chinese did not appreciate each other’s music, his interloc­utor replied, “Our airs are not made for their ears, and their ears are not made for our airs, it should not be surprising that one cannot experience the beauties of the other’s [music].”71 This anecdote is not the only report of bemused Chinese reactions to Western music in this era. Some decades later, diplomats attached to the Macartney Embassy reported similar indif­ ference from Chinese listeners.72 It does, however, offer contrast to accounts of native Caribs in the French Antilles around 1750 reacting enthusiastically to the same performance of Les sauvages.73 Perhaps in such stories the Chi­ nese, not yet objects of direct colonial desire, were permitted by the West to have their own musical taste. By the time Amiot’s tale about Chinese reception of Rameau’s music reached France, Rameau had been dead for over a decade. But it is worth considering the exchange between the two authors as a kind of dialogue. The auditory universalism of Rameau, a key protagonist of musical En­ lightenment, was put to the test, and Amiot’s interlocutor found it want­ ing. He believed that anatomy and culture (“our ears”) make musical taste. This position was soon to be articulated by Rameau’s sometime admirer and then bitter polemical enemy Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. It contributed, eventu­ ally, to the comprehensive dismissal of Chinese music by Western writers. In the meantime, however, what matters is that the Enlightenment idea of a universal ear was circulating, and being discussed, across so wide a distance.

Rousseau’s China and the Querelle des Bouffons I am not unaware that every time it is a question of their Music the French flatly deny competence to all other peoples, and they have their reasons for this. Nevertheless, when these same French assure us that Chinese mu­ sic is detestable, I do not believe they have taken the trouble to take into account the view of the Chinese when pronouncing this judgment. Why should they deprive us with regard to them, at least concerning Music, of a right they employ quite freely, and on more than one point, with regard to other Nations?74

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Friedrich Melchior Grimm wrote these lines in the first heat of battle for Italian music and against French music that would come to be known as the querelle des bouffons, or “quarrel of the buffoons.” On the surface, the querelle was a dispute about the relative merits of (melodic) Italian as embodied by opera buffa and (harmonic) French music as exemplified by tragédie lyrique. Below the surface it was many other things, including a release for philo­ sophical and political tensions that were building in Enlightenment Paris by the middle of the eighteenth century.75 Here Grimm makes a simple point about national prejudice, of which the Chinese, like the Italians, ap­ pear to be victims. Behind it, however, lies a strong objection to the uni­ versal value Grimm accused his opponents, including Rameau, of ascribing to their preferred aesthetic position. For one basic element of the querelle was the rejection by one side of theories about music that presumed it to be governed by an objective, scientific set of rules such as those provided by Rameau’s corps sonore. In the letter Grimm suggests that people should have a right to speak in defense of their own expressive arts before they are judged. It is an irony that at least some of Grimm’s fellow philosophes did try to consult the Chinese about their musical values via Amiot, who took up residence in Beijing just as the querelle began to boil over. All the same, Grimm could not have made this point were it not for the inspiration of his new ally Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, whose writings were one of the key ingredients in the querelle’s explosive mix of philosophical provocation, po­ litical innuendo, and musical scandal. And Rousseau, it turns out, was also thinking about China and its music, even if he never took Grimm’s advice and tried to ask the Chinese about it. Why does it matter what Rousseau thought of Chinese music? One rea­ son is that his opponent Rameau took the opposite tack, attempting to reach out to Chinese music theory by appealing to physical commonalities with its Western counterparts. The idea that music was a science was exactly what proponents of the new anthropology, especially Rousseau, set out to destroy in the querelle and similar disputes. Rationalists like Wolff and Rameau thought of listening as a universal human practice and of sounds as potentially signs that anyone, anywhere could decipher. Rousseau agreed with the first point. But, as Matthew Gelbart writes, Rousseau “reframed the concept of musi­ cal universality by addressing ‘nature’ in music as human nature more than the physical properties of the universe.”76 For Rousseau, between sound and its representation lay a human story that scientific language could not tell. The ruler of this zone would later come to be called culture. The origins

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of language, he argued, were attempts not to mimic the natural world in sound, but to say something about it in authentic expressions of sentiment. The medium of such expression is language, spoken and heard, not writ­ ing. “Writing, which appears to fix language,” Rousseau wrote in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, “is precisely what changes it for the worse; it changes not its words but its genius; it substitutes precision for expressive­ ness. One conveys one’s feelings in speaking and one’s ideas in writing.”77 Rousseau would have been unable to accept the rationalist equivalence of music and moral action behind Wolff ’s parable of the music master and the unborn child, even if he might have been attracted to the idea that music can function in a space that is prior to rationality. Folksong was Rousseau’s point of entry into discussions about China. The article “Music” in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, whose more than nine hundred articles display his mature musical thought, features a Chi­ nese melody.78 The melody, which was to become one of the most famous and influential music examples in Western music history, is one of four that Rousseau uses to explain his idea about the special expressive power of folk music. The others are a Persian melody, a song of the First Nations of Can­ ada, and the famous “Ranz des vaches,” a Swiss folk tune. As Rousseau ex­­ plains, this melody “was so generally beloved among the Swiss, that it is forbidden under pain of death to be played to Swiss troops [soldiers serv­ ing as mercenaries] because it made them burst into tears, desert, or die, whoever heard it; so great a desire did it excite in them of returning to their country.”79 It would be useless, Rousseau continues, to seek any clues in the musical material (“energic accents”) that are “capable of producing such as­­ tonishing effects.” Further, he observes, this music doesn’t work on non-­ Swiss. Its power comes from “custom, reflections, and a thousand circum­ stances which, retraced by those who hear them, and recalling the idea of their country, their former pleasures, and all their joys of life, excite in them a bitter sorrow for the loss of them.” For Rousseau the song “does not in this case act as music, but as a memorative sign.” He concludes, “It is not in their physical action that we should seek the greatest effects of sounds on the human heart.”80 This marks a crucial departure from the rationalist position on sound and music. To Wolff, for instance, it didn’t matter what kind of music a “sound” was, or indeed if such a sound was music at all. It was enough to observe that a physical phenomenon had a positive moral and ethical effect on lis­ teners. Likewise, Rameau was not really interested in what Chinese music

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sounded like. For him, confirmation that he and the Chinese understood the overtone series in broadly similar ways—­even if they did not go as far as he liked in their underlying mathematical approach—­was enough to reinforce his sense that certain sonic materials must work the same way everywhere. Rousseau, on the other hand, in his discussion of the “Ranz des vaches,” denies that sounds on their own have any kind of physical power to change people. Only when sound is configured as a “memorative sign,” and received by those whose particular experiences allow it, can it work on the emotions. The set of “memorative signs” here could be called music. These signs point to the special zone of expression that Rousseau places between thought and language. The consequence is the detachment of (quantifiable) physical sound from the cultural practice of music. In the matter of China’s music Rousseau was not well served by West­ ern intermediaries such as Du Halde, from whose dictionary he copied his Chinese tune. Although he was aware that Chinese music was in practice monophonic, he mistakenly thought that the Chinese had no means of no­­ tating it. Their supposed rejection of both harmony and notation made it simple for Rousseau to construct them as comparatively free of some of civilization’s deleterious effects. It also confirmed his suspicion that writing down music at all was unique to Europeans. In the article “Characters of Music” in the Dictionary he writes: There are no nations but the European, who understand the art of writ­ ing their music. Though in other parts of world every people has its own, it does not appear that any of them have extended their researches so far as the formation of characters to denote it. At least, it is certain that neither the Arabians nor the Chinese, the two foreign people who have most cultivated the arts, have any such similar characters. . . . [In] regard to the Chinese, we find in P. du Halde that they were extremely surprised to see the Jesuits mark and read on the same note, all the Chinese airs, with which they made them acquainted.81

Thus a Chinese melody appears in the dictionary because Rousseau be­ lieved that the Chinese, despite their cultivation in other fields, had not suc­­ cumbed to the temptation of writing music down. As a result their music was comparable in its effect to the “Ranz des vaches.” Rousseau’s Chinese tune enjoyed a significant afterlife. Starting with its use by Carl Maria von Weber in his opera Turandot, it became a frequent marker of  “Chinese” musical exoticism through the nineteenth century and

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beyond.82 At the time, however, Rousseau’s association of  “authentic” mel­­ ody with non-­Western ways of making music had a direct impact on reac­ tions to European discoveries of the way distant peoples and places sounded. The reception of his writings coincided with a fresh wave of information about non-­Western soundscapes. It rapidly became common to interpret the dif­­ferences between the West and the “rest” in terms derived from Rous­ seau’s polemics against French music.83 Indeed, Rousseau’s claim that more “pri­­mitive” or less “civilized” peoples made music that was sim­­pler—­and for Rousseau thus superior—­shaped the formation of the first world histories of music written by Europeans such as Charles Burney and Johann Niko­ laus Forkel.84 Both authors, following Rousseau’s lead (if not his preference for “simple” music), imagined that societies in distant locales such as the South Seas represented earlier stages of human music making.85 This was to have profound consequences for Western attempts to integrate China into a world history of music. Rousseau’s positive construction of Chinese music was built on a misun­ derstanding about Chinese music and notation. But that does not make the appearance of a Chinese melody in one of the most important statements of his musical philosophy any less significant. Rousseau’s insistence that writing was merely a supplement to real expression, musical and otherwise, marked a decisive break with what had gone before and cleared the way for the “new anthropology.” Yet in one respect his idea that sound alone, di­ vorced from “memorative signs,” cannot represent emotions parallels Amiot’s observation that in Chinese music theory correct musical sounds under­ stood as action, as music, are a manifestation of a “general accord” in Chi­ nese society. Indeed, if Rousseau had any sympathy with China it was for exactly this. In contrast to critics of Chinese despotism such as Montes­ quieu, Rousseau claimed in an early text that the Chinese emperor—­in “accord” with his subjects—­used his absolute power to express the authen­­ tic will of the people, thus providing a counterweight to the corruption of China’s large bureaucracy. “The Emperor,” he writes, “being satisfied that public outcry does not arise without cause, always discovers, through the seditious clamours which he punishes, just grievances to redress.”86 Indeed, some of Rousseau’s political ideas about the “general will”—­which were articulated later, in the Social Contract of 1762—­might thus be illuminated by his turn to a Chinese piece in the Dictionnaire. By the time of the Social Contract, in the final stages of his career, Rousseau had little positive to say about China. But at a crucial juncture Chinese music stood for the authen­ tic voice he missed in Europe.87

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Big Ears: Herder’s Chinese Listening Johann Gottfried Herder’s vast writings on national identity, literary the­ ory, historiography, linguistics, and aesthetics, and his deep interest in the ear as humanity’s gateway to the world, make him an ideal guide to thought about sound in the German Enlightenment. Yet in the mid-­twentieth cen­ tury, many writing in English steered clear of Herder, with the famous excep­ tion of  Isaiah Berlin, whose writings long set the terms of engagement with Herder’s work.88 Berlin, followed a decade later by Charles Taylor, argued that Herder was not—­as many had held him to be—­an anti-­Enlightenment proto-­nationalist, but instead was the key figure of an entirely new way to look at how humans communicated with each other.89 Berlin and Tay­ lor called Herder’s contribution “expressivism.” Herder’s thinking followed Rousseau’s in many respects concerning the power of expressive song. But Herder was the first Enlightenment philosopher to articulate convincingly the idea that language itself is a relationship between two parties express­ ing themselves to each other in sound. Everybody—­depending on anatomy and environment—­makes sense of language differently. From such differ­ ence comes “culture.” Since the 1990s the Herder literature, in German, English, and other lan­ guages, has exploded.90 Herder emerges as the key protagonist of the “an­ thropological turn” or “new anthropology” in German letters around 1770.91 Many focus on the importance of listening in Herder’s thought.92 Ethno­ musicologist Philip Bohlman argues that Herder, who collected and wrote about folk music of European and non-­European peoples, was the first to think about music not through text alone but through the “representational practices” of fieldwork. “In Herder’s Enlightenment,” Bohlman writes, “music entered history as a human measure of a response to change.”93 Herder explored China in his main discussion of world history, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–­91), a work that expanded on his earlier Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774). He begins by claiming he does not subscribe to the “flattering im­ age of the Chinese constitution, especially as it has been sent to Europe by missionaries to be admired and even held up as a political ideal not only by speculative philosophers but also by men of state.”94 Neither, he continues, does we want to deny “the Chinese credit for either their high culture or their special way of life.” His aim, instead, is to explore the “obstacles” that have prevented China from developing further. These “lie in [China’s] char­ acter, location, and history clearly before our eyes.” The details of China’s

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long history are not important. It would be all the same to Herder if the Chinese “required a few thousand years more or less” to reach their  pres­­ ent state. A more important factor is the ethnic admixture of Chinese with “Mon­ golian” peoples. In Herder’s opinion, “Mongolians” had dominated China for a long time, stretching back to before the conquest of China by Genghis Khan during the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century CE and the as­ sumption of power by the Manchus (whom Herder conflates with Mon­ golians) in the seventeenth. The result is a political state of “half-­Tartar despotism, later covered over with shining statements of ethics and morals.” This combination of nomadic and sedentary civilizations—­Herder finds it deeply unsatisfactory—­makes the Chinese different from Europeans in cru­ cial respects. “Just as the compass needle takes another direction in China than in Europe,” he writes with typical panache, if without regard for the facts of magnetism, “so can the peoples of this region never become Greeks and Romans. They were and remain Chinese, a people that is favoured by nature with small eyes, a blunt nose, a flat forehead, little beard, big ears, and a fat stomach.”95 Anatomy is destiny. The “big ears” are crucial. What also makes Herder’s “Mongolian”-­ influenced Chinese different is “a fine sense of hearing that one would never find in other peoples.” The ear is the gateway to the world, and only a “Mongolian” ear would make so complex a spoken language as Chinese, which is formed “out of 330 syllables that have in every word five or more accents in order to avoid calling a gentleman a beast and otherwise com­ mitting the most hilarious mistakes.” Indeed, “a European ear and Euro­ pean organs of speech would only with great difficulty or never accustom themselves to such an exaggerated syllabic music.” The “exaggeration” of the Chinese language makes it difficult for the Chinese to change and prog­ ress, because they are constantly bogged down in details: “What a lack of imagination in big things and what awful precision in small things were necessary to invent this language out of the endless amount of 80,000 con­ structed characters, which with six or more dialects distinguishes the Chi­ nese nation from all other peoples of the world.”96 Herder’s linkage between “Mongolian” ears and the Chinese language leads him to dismiss many aspects of Chinese civilization. “Only a truly ne­ glected sensibility,” he writes, “could arrive at this development of political culture and allow itself so to be modeled by it.”97 The “cleanly painted forms of their curled characters and the ding-­a-­ling of finely formed sentences” mean that the “gift of free, major discovery in the arts and sciences seems

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to have been, as is the case with several nations in this corner of the earth, denied them by nature.” Indeed, in their “permanent back and forth for business and profit” one could “still consider them nomadic Mongols.” That they have been “richly endowed with a . . . crafty bustle and sense of detail, this artistic talent of education,” is little consolation, since in the end it only “suits their greed.”98 His next observation is quoted often: “The [Chinese] empire is an embalmed mummy, painted with hieroglyphs and wrapped in silk: its inner circulation is like that of a hibernating animal.” Herder concludes this portion of the Ideen with a disclaimer that he is not judging the Chinese with “ill will.” He is, he claims, only reporting arguments that have already been made by China’s “warmest defenders.”99 We would think the same of ancient Egypt, he concludes. Only the Chinese, unlike other an­­ cient peoples, have simply refused to decline and fall. This refusal seems to have something to do with the Chinese people’s “big ears.” This is not Herder’s finest hour. For all his importance as the father of modern ideas of fieldwork, empirically Herder seems not to have engaged with actual Chinese sound worlds, in particular Chinese music, whose rela­ tive “simplicity” he might have found to his liking. During the genesis of the Ideen he would potentially have had a chance to consult Amiot’s Mémoire. He does cite classic Jesuit sources, including the multivolume Mémoires concernant [les] Chinois in which Amiot’s report was published, but there is no sign that he read Amiot. Instead, he supplements general Jesuit writings with an anti-­Chinese travelogue by the Swedish pastor Olaf  Torén (or To­ reen) and several authors resident in Russia, including the anatomist Peter Simon Pallas.100 This last might explain his focus on Mongol influences, since Pallas’s book concerns itself mainly with that people and their physi­ cal traits. Likewise, he seems not to have read Charles Burney’s brief at­ tempt in his General History of Music (see chapter 3 below) to explain the Chinese preference for pentatonic melodies. Burney uses this observation to make the spurious but nevertheless long-­lived claim that Chinese music demonstrates some kinship between the Chinese and the (also pentatonic) Scots. Herder, a long-­standing admirer of the (fictional) Scots bard Ossian, would likely have made something interesting of Burney’s thesis. But Herder, who includes no Chinese music in any of his folksong collections, seems not to have received Burney’s book, which was published five years before Herder began work on the Ideen.101 Instead Herder plays to an imagined Rousseauvian gallery with innu­ endoes about nations whose high culture prevents them from finding real

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Enlightenment. France—­and French listening, the subject of the querelles Rousseau was so involved in—­may be the target. This melding of China with France is not far-­fetched. China, it appears, figured in some German circles as an exaggeration of France. In the same year as the publication of the Ideen, Moses Mendelssohn opined in his entry to the prize contest “What Is Enlightenment?” (put on by the Berlin Academy of Sciences and eventually won by Immanuel Kant) that “the French [have] more culture, the English more enlightenment; the Chinese much culture and little en­ lightenment.”102 Perhaps Herder was thinking along similar lines. Herder’s conclusion that China lacks dynamism also echoes Charles Montesquieu’s division in The Spirit of the Laws of governmental forms into monarchies, despotisms, and republics. Where a nation ends up on this spectrum depends on various factors such as geography, climate, and spe­ cific history, but also on the interaction between religion, mores (culturally determined conduct that comes from within society), manners (conduct be­­ tween people that is externally regulated), and laws. Montesquieu, one of China’s most vocal critics in eighteenth-­century Europe, argues that the Chinese rely on “rites” (ritual) to regulate all four and are thus insufficiently critical about how they come together and what this means for their wider national community.103 Besides Herder, Montesquieu had many followers, including Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations reflects a view widely held among Western observers in the later eighteenth century that the long his­ tories of China’s institutions are a sign that the country was “stuck” beyond historical change.104 Like Rousseau, Herder associated civilization with theory, stiffness, and dishonesty. He reserved special frustration for the “abstract” relation of spo­ ken to written Chinese. Presence mattered to him. Sound is present; ab­ straction is not. This “phonocentrism” made him particularly wary of what he took to be a completely formalized language and culture.105 But there is more to Herder’s polemical position. In some ways China itself is less of an issue than Herder’s need, despite his protestations of evenhandedness, to put down a marker in opposition to anyone who considered China a model. Foremost among his opponents would have been followers of  Wolff ’s phi­ losophy or anything like it. Wolff had been dead for thirty years by then, but his ideas were still current in more conservative circles of German academic philosophy.106 Another factor might be the controversy around Spinozism, also associated with the godless yet virtuous Chinese, which had simmered around Wolff (who always denied the charge) and resurfaced just at the

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time the Ideen was written in the vicious dispute over Lessing’s supposed deathbed confession to Mendelssohn of Spinozist atheism.107 Herder, a Lutheran pastor who wrote extensively on Spinoza and was himself in dan­ ger of being taken for a Spinozist, could afford no such suspicions. Herd­­ er’s insistence on China’s radical difference may well have been a defensive move against still-­influential Wolffians. It also made it impossible for his followers to continue the attenuated dialogue between Europe and China about music and sound.

China and the End of Listening Enlightenment thought about music and listening—­or, better, the thought of several enlightenments—­was brought into focus by encounter and com­ parison with China. Christian Wolff, midcentury Germany’s leading ra­ tionalist, chose a Chinese parable about the moral effects of the right kind of music to close his controversial “Oratio de sinarum.” There he conceded that non-­Christian musical practices might make (heathen) audiences bet­ ter people, and that such practices ought to serve as a model for European Christians. His Pietist opponents might have agreed with him that the ear was a gateway to the human soul, but they would never have countenanced the idea that benevolent sounds unconnected to Christianity could have caused moral improvement. Like Herder, who was in some ways their heir, they would have distrusted Wolff ’s universalist optimism. So China did have something to do with the formation of enlightened ideas about sound, music, and listening. Many in Enlightenment Europe were drawn to China precisely because it seemed so far away, so strange, yet at the same time oddly similar. The philosophe recognized in the mandarin a potentially commensurate interlocutor. This chapter has argued that the re­ lationship between Rameau and Amiot, who cannot be proved to have read each other’s work but did seem to respond to each other at least indirectly, could have followed this pattern. Rameau’s ideas about harmony were, of course, products of his own thinking and his long career as a composer. But late in his life, as the act of summing up his musical philosophy was lead­ ing him further and further into speculation about nature itself, the arrival in Parisian circles of Amiot’s first reports and materials on Chinese music convinced him that he was right in believing that all musical expression everywhere depended on the physical fact of the sounding body, the corps sonore. His triumphant proclamation on the first page of the “Nouvelles

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réflexions” that the Chinese classics confirm his theory was aimed at read­ ers at home and, potentially, in remote China. Indeed, he had at least one reader there, the Jesuit Amiot, who had translated Li’s treatise and arranged for it to be circulated in Paris. The philosophe had found his mandarin. Amiot assumed the role of a learned Chinese, or at least had assimilated Chinese thought to the point that he could position himself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy medi­ ator. Years later, Amiot answered Rameau in his own report on Chinese music, claiming this music—­not harmonic in the technical sense—­did de­ pend on a kind of “natural” harmony, albeit one Rameau would not have recognized. He added a performative dimension to the exchange, reporting on his performance of Rameau’s Les sauvages to a Chinese audience. In the piece Rameau tried to capture in his own idiom (which he consid­ ered universal) the essence of non-­European otherness. Amiot played it to his Chinese interlocutors at the Beijing court, and it fell flat. Perhaps his Chinese listeners could not recognize in it their own ideas about the deep connections between musical and social harmony. But just because the at­ tempt was a failure, one cannot conclude that there was no dialogue. By attempting to give such a dialogue a wider spatial and temporal frame, I have revealed a network of knowledge creation about sound and listening that has previously been obscure. Amiot’s experiment in Beijing illustrates how this network functioned. He could not deny that the Chinese found little to like about Western music, despite his own attempts to persuade them otherwise. But he did suggest that the Chinese conception of music was broadly comparable to European ideas about the relation between music and language: notes being words and phrases being sentences. And his de­ scription of the overall dramaturgy of Chinese musical practice seems even to echo the reform programs of Europeans such as Gluck and his librettist Calzabigi. At the same time, he appealed to the authority of ancient Chi­ nese practices, which he believed might have represented an original world music.108 Thus he joined another part of a global network of knowledge creation about the origins of music. This network was not flat. Amiot in Beijing had a clear view neither of Rameau’s project in Paris nor of wider European developments.109 Euro­ pean and Chinese listeners and readers engaged with each other’s thought about sound and music via complex, interlocking channels of communica­ tion, both manuscript and print. This topography was determined by insti­ tutions: the musical establishment at Qianlong’s court on the one hand—­a

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site of competing agendas—­and the fluid European public sphere on the other.110 Technology mattered too: Amiot had recourse to a Western harp­ sichord in order to sound Rameau’s music for a Chinese audience. Rameau and those who came after him had little if any way to experience real Chi­ nese music beyond, perhaps, a few instruments that had made their way to Europe but that no one knew how to play. Dialogue around 1750 between Westerners and Chinese about music—­and indeed all subjects—­was ob­ scured by the contingencies of the entangled network that made it possible. But it was a dialogue nonetheless. Future scholars will, I hope, attempt to further illuminate the ins and outs of this networked conversation, for ex­ ample, by bringing the Chinese side into better focus. Readers in European languages know astoundingly little about what Amiot’s listeners and inter­ locutors in Beijing might really have been thinking.111 One thing is certain: on the Chinese side, discussions about sound, meaning, and identity will have been just as entangled as they were in the West.112 In this chapter I have also argued that the rise of Enlightenment “new anthropology,” especially the notion that senses were more culturally de­ termined than universal, made continuing dialogue with China, however multidimensional, impossible. The “new anthropology,” of course, was itself the product of a similarly complex network. It emerged out of interactions between philosophers, anatomists, novelists, theologians, travel writers, nat­ uralists, economists, and many professions in between. These interactions unfolded in a complex media landscape in which texts circulated through different media, languages, and channels of distribution. Later in the eigh­ teenth century distrust of the rationalist ideas of  Wolff ’s generation was a frequent common denominator. But some of the new anthropologists also shared with Wolff a certain faith in the universality of human senses and the possibility that humans might come together around certain ideas—­ such as “compassion”—­regardless of their race, gender, or geographic ori­ gin. Indeed, key protagonists of the “new anthropology,” such as Rousseau, imagined that history unfolded on a global stage born of shared original sentiments, if not exactly language. The language these sentiments used, more song than speech, was marked by its simple and pure sonic expres­ sion. Rousseau (rather inconsistently, considering his mixed opinion about China) chose Chinese music as one of only four examples of folksong in the “music” entry of his Dictionary of Music. In the case of China Herder took a harder line. He found the Chinese, thanks to their geography and anatomy, to have been unable to mature as a civilization because of their “overdeveloped” sense of hearing. My point here

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is not to use Herder’s treatment of Chinese sound worlds to place him in one or the other enlightenment. If that were the aim, then for every exam­ ple of Herder’s reductive and racist approach to Chinese listening, his de­­ fenders could present a counterexample. They could point out, for instance, Herder’s protesting in this text his innocence of the charge of unfairness by allowing the Chinese, like any people, the right to make their own sonic worlds as they want them. The aim, instead, is to acknowledge the com­ plexities of the network of actors in which Herder made these claims. One aspect of this complexity would be the instability of the “new anthropology” itself. Another would be Herder’s Rousseauvian predisposition to read “so­ phistication” and “cultivation”—­especially as relating to the ear—­as nega­ tive traits, and to focus on the yearning this conceals for authentic kinds of aural expression. Such authenticity, Herder surmises, would be hard to find in a social environment as “cultivated” as China’s. A third would be Herder’s dependence on a certain combination of sources. In his efforts to paint a “fair” picture of China, he clearly acknowledges centuries of positive reports written by missionaries. On the other hand, he draws explicitly on less enthusiastic witnesses such as the Swedish traveler Olof  Torén and the geographer Peter Simon Pallas, whose opinions of China were formed not in Canton or Beijing, but on Russia’s wild Manchurian frontier. By 1800 no one in Europe was seriously contemplating, as Rameau had, deep ties between Western and Chinese listening. Herder’s perspective—­ as further chapters in this book will argue—­had begun to gain the upper hand. The consequences were wide ranging. The story of China’s sonic de­ cline in the Western imagination parallels the rise of a sense of Europe’s special place as the home of musical art. Thanks to the nationalizing of taste made possible by Herder’s theory of radical difference, German thinkers in particular positioned their still imaginary nation as Europe’s home of “higher” music. Indeed, those who imagined a “special path” or Sonderweg for German history as a whole always reserved a special place for the “most German of the arts.”113 On this special path music itself was defined anew, often, as here, against the otherness of non-­European models. The decline in European assessments of Chinese sounds follows a trajectory opposite to the emergence of aestheticized instrumental music as a category of its own, beyond noise and folk song.114 The particular prestige of wordless music hov­ ers as a sovereign concept above many of today’s academic discussions of human expression relating to hearing.115 In such discussions the most presti­ gious forms of all are the mostly German instrumental works that—­at least until the upheavals in anglophone musicology of the 1990s—­have long been

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at the center of musical scholarship and music criticism. It is customary to locate the origins of this ideal around 1800, in the era of the great “classi­ cal” composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Herder’s radical attention to the differences between one culture and another, and therefore also between the West and what would become “the rest,” had something central to do with this. Herder figures for some as the first global historian of sound, and rightly so.116 He argued that music, the art of making and listening to meaningful sound, is something one can trace through the past—­anywhere and in any register. The essence of this history was difference. The world’s musical past, he claimed, was as varied as the people who made it and the places where it was made. But his position reflects a particular enlightenment, one among many; and as I have argued here, it was not necessarily consistent. Herder found Chinese listening different and—­compared with other places—­ problematic. He offered an alternative to an older universalism according to which Chinese and Western listeners might well have heard music the same way. This universalism, as unsustainable as it may have proved in prac­ tice, had enabled Europeans and Chinese to communicate with one an­ other, briefly, about how music worked. Herder’s discovery of difference sounded the death knell of this dialogue.

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Soundscapes in the Contact Zone Listening in Canton, 1770–­1839

T

The Sound of the Contact Zone

his chapter travels to the port city of canton, the main source of direct European knowledge about Chinese sounds around 1800. From about 1700 until the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842—­a period Western historians call the era of “the Canton System” or “Old Canton”—­China’s maritime interaction with the world outside its bor­ ders took place mostly here.1 About 1770—­the loose starting point of the era discussed in this chapter—­Britain became China’s most important trading partner.2 The sources I use are overwhelmingly British (and later, North American).3 With the exception of a manuscript memoir by a German si­­ nologist, they come from a rich archive of firsthand reports of the early China trade published during the period and after.4 These are documents of what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone”—­a space where Westerners meet, interact with, and observe peoples over whom they already have some de­ gree of colonial and imperial control or, in the case of China, whom they may want to control.5 It is important to remember that Canton was not a settler colony. Western political ambitions there were limited to improving conditions of trade. Indeed, in the years leading up to the First Opium War Westerners increasingly complained about Chinese attempts to suppress free trade, and relations with the Chinese authorities suffered accordingly. By the end of the period British attempts to protect the lucrative but forbidden business of selling opium led to a breakdown of relations and finally to war. Yet as historians Paul van Dyke and John Carroll have argued, over the long term Sino-­Western relations on the Pearl River were surprisingly stable. The Canton System, Carroll argues, “was an encounter defined by . . . mutual commitment to pecuniary gain, tension, and conflict but also accommoda­ tion and adaptation.”6

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This chapter investigates Western listening in the context of such con­ flict and compromise, against the background of a long-­term collapse of Sino-­Western relations. The vast majority of its earwitnesses were British (and later American) professional men: traders, naval officers, naturalists, diplomats, missionaries, and doctors. All were products of the upper classes or used their travel to China to gain a higher station back home.7 Some took a sympathetic interest in what they heard in Canton, especially Chi­ nese music. Many celebrated the vastness of the Canton soundscape, in which millions of people made noise together at once; they were awestruck by the sheer difference of Canton’s sound worlds. Most, however, found Chi­ nese sounds off-­putting, even threatening. They wrote about them with ab­ solute confidence in Western superiority. Pratt argues that such men saw the world through “imperial eyes.”  This chapter explores the possibility that their ears were imperial too. Two listeners stand out. The first is the British medical doctor Charles Toogood Downing, about whom very little is known despite the wide re­ ception of his memoir of Canton, The Fan-­Qui in China.8 As a medical doc­ tor without a formal role in the Canton System, Downing is typical of the kind of nineteenth-­century traveling observer Pratt describes. She argues that such figures often parsed sites of colonial desire in a “scientific” mode of supposedly dispassionate observation.9 In the memoir Downing recounts an extensive stay in Canton and documents his impressions of the city, its environment, its inhabitants, and Sino-­Western relations. Downing’s at­ titude toward Chinese sounds was negative nearly to the point of exaggera­ tion. But his curiosity about them—­and the people who made them—­goes beyond what is commonly found in the literature on Old Canton. Down­ ing was deeply intrigued by the human origins of the sounds he heard in the city and often took pains to observe them being made. When he writes of his experience he often slips into Pratt’s second mode of imperial obser­ vation, the “sentimental,” especially when confronted with the inescapable sonic unfamiliarity of what he heard in Canton. A second key earwitness is the German scholar (and future pioneer of German sinology) Karl Friedrich Neumann. Neumann (born Izaak Bam­ berger in 1793) was a Jewish convert to Lutheranism who began his aca­ demic career in the 1820s.10 Determined to become an expert on China, he learned Chinese in Paris without ever encountering a native speaker. In 1829 he was commissioned by the Prussian state to acquire a library of Chi­­ nese books. To that end he traveled to Canton in adventurous circumstances.

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His original plan—­to trade passage in return for giving French lessons to the captain of an East India Company ship—­fell through when the com­ pany ruled that it would be too dangerous to bring a passenger uninvolved in trade, in defiance of Chinese regulations. Neumann was undeterred, and with the captain’s cooperation he signed on as an able seaman. As Neumann’s circle of friends in London warned him, this was a risky idea: as a simple sailor he would be subject to military-­style discipline while on board. Neu­ mann survived the trip comfortably. His chronicle of life on the Indiaman Sir David Scott and his account of Macao and Canton are preserved in a manuscript memoir held at the Bavarian State Library.11 Neumann’s de­ scriptions of Chinese soundscapes are not as comprehensive as Downing’s, but they stand out for their sympathy to Chinese sound worlds. They also demonstrate his openness to the sounds made by nonelite Westerners, par­­ ticularly the sailors who worked on the Sir David Scott. His descriptions of their musicking, dancing, and boxing—­for him, related activities—­represent a rarity in the archive of Old Canton. This chapter aims to make sense of how Westerners heard Canton be­ tween the extremes represented by Downing and Neumann. It will follow them as listeners across a varied soundscape, from the bay where Western ships were obliged to anchor, up the Pearl River, to the city itself. Their lis­­ tening crosses musical registers and social and political contexts. It offers a window onto Western constructions of China in sound in a crucial era.

Whampoa: China’s First Soundscape Oceangoing trade arrived in Canton at the Whampoa (Huang-­pu) anchor­ age, twelve miles downriver from the city (see fig. 2.1). Shipping was not allowed to proceed farther because of the ships’ deep drafts and because the Chinese were reluctant to allow heavily armed Western vessels any closer to the city.12 Traffic from Whampoa upriver to the Western factories in the center of Canton was carried on by smaller boats. Because many Western mariners visited Whampoa more than once, coming to anchor there after a journey of months across the Indian Ocean or the Pacific meant reunion with old friends in a familiar place. Some ships marked their arrival with music: “If there is a band on board,” wrote Charles Toogood Downing, who traveled to Canton in the 1830s, “one of the favourite national airs is struck up, while everyone on board prepares himself with pleasure, to distinguish among the fleet, some one individual vessel in which he takes an interest, or

figu re 2.1  The Canton River from the Second Bar to the Upper Reach of Whampoa Creek. Published by James Horsburgh, hydrographer to the Honorable E. I. Com­ pany, February 2, 1818. Map Collection, US Library of Congress.

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fig u re 2.2  Whampoa from Danes Island. H. Fisher Son and Company, ca. 1800. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

to return the cheerful greeting of a friend.”13 Another traveler arrived at the anchorage by night and woke up the next morning to “the sound of music appearing to come from different directions, the effect being delightful. . . . [E]ach of the foreign ships had an excellent band, consisting of every de­ scription of wind and martial instruments. . . . I never heard any thing that pleased me more.”14 Western ships at Whampoa, the upper parts of their masts visible for miles around in the flat countryside, rested at anchor in shallow waters around a group of islands, one of them distinguished by a tall pagoda (see fig. 2.2). Downing writes that “after passing [the] Second-­bar [the last tidal obstacle in the estuary], the Tigris winds and curves about in a beautiful manner, through a low marshy country, so very flat and level that very soon afterwards you are able to see over five or six different reaches, or projec­ tions of the shore, the upper masts and rigging of the ships lying at Wham­ poa, a distance of some miles.”15 At the height of the trading season over the winter there were dozens of European (and, after 1783, also American) ships in the anchorage. Ships often remained at Whampoa for months while captains and supercargoes did business with the Cohong, the Chinese trad­ ing firms authorized by the Chinese government to conduct commerce with Westerners.

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Once he arrived at the anchorage, a new visitor might first have made out the ringing of a lonely bell, followed by single shots from a small can­ non. This was the sound of mortality. Death from accident and disease was com­­mon on board the Western ships. Funerals offered an opportunity for West­erners of all nationalities to come together as a community.16 Officers and company officials were granted solemn and sometimes extravagant buri­­ als on one of the islands, their bodies brought on a barge followed by a pa­­ rade of small boats, to the sound of a muffled drum accompanied by single cannon shots fired once every minute. In the late 1780s Samuel Shaw, the first American consul at Canton, observed that “when the corpse appears in sight, the commodore of the nation to which it belongs begins to fire minute-­guns, which are repeated by the other ships in port, and continued till the corpse is interred.”17 The anchorage was also the site of sometimes elaborate ceremonial en­­ counters between Westerners and Chinese officials. These were the visits to the anchorage of the Chinese inspector of maritime customs (the hoppo). With a large entourage, this senior official (usually an ethnic Manchu) ar­ rived at the anchorage to measure newly arrived Western ships. The proce­ dure was highly ceremonial and often lasted more than an hour. It was a noisy affair featuring Chinese and Western bands, gong ringing, singing, and most of all repeated cannon salutes.18 Downing was struck by the contrast between the constant activity in the anchorage and the natural beauty of the surroundings. Viewing the land­ scape from the highest point on Dane’s Island, he observed that the rice paddies all around appeared to make up “one large, lovely meadow, and the most sanguine wishes are formed that it were possible to be on horseback and scampering across them, to reach the many-­tinted hills which bound the prospect beyond.”19 This is Pratt’s “sentimental” mode of imperial view­ ing. It expresses Downing’s desire to possess what he sees (which appears devoid of human habitation) by “scampering across” it. He frames the scene “with the many-­tinted hills beyond”—­and, in his observation cited earlier, the pleasing soundscape of  Whampoa, where music from the decks of  West­ ern ships wafts pleasantly across the anchorage—­in the classic language of the picturesque: the late eighteenth-­century discourse of British art criti­ cism concerned with domesticating natural beauty for artistic consumption and contemplation.20 Pratt argues that both this mode of vision and its “scientific” counterpart “[underwrote] cultural appropriation” by protago­ nists of imperialism. As this chapter will argue, listening can do the same

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work, but with a difference. A viewer may choose to look away or to narrate a landscape without the people who are in it. Pratt proposes that removing colonial peoples can be a crucial step toward “underwriting” their subjuga­ tion.21 On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the agents of human-­ generated sounds. Imperial ears are drawn to the subaltern’s noisy presence.

Noise At the end of a busy day the sounds of commerce receded. In the mid-­1750s one traveler reported that “the delightful setting was enhanced by the bands of the foreign ships striking up for an hour before sunset.”22 Downing, whose memoir often slips poetically into the second person—­another sign of Pratt’s “sentimental” mode—­reports that “enjoying the cool air of the summer eve­ ning, every thing around you seems at rest, and you distinctly hear every stroke of the ship’s bell . . . as it is wafted across the calm, unruffled sur­ face of the water.” The regular sounding of Western bells—­here keeping time—­mixed with similar sounds from Chinese ships and with the sounds of nature. The Swedish explorer Pehr Osbeck, who visited Canton earlier in the eighteenth century, reported that in the anchorage “at night we heard a kind of music, partly made by insects and partly made by the Gungang [a brass gong] in the sampans.” Sound marked time’s passing. “On board [Chi­ nese] ships,” Osbeck writes, “is a quarter-­master, or cadet, who stands near the compass, and cries out, when the half-­hour glass is run down, to him who is near the bell, how many pulls he must give.”23 For Downing, a much later visitor to Canton, the passing junks and sam­ pans disturbed an otherwise peaceful soundscape: On [sic] a sudden, you are awakened from your reverie by the violent clashing of gongs on board the passing stranger, which continue to be beaten without intermission, and with such force and jarring discord as to be almost deafening. The slumbering sailor is awakened as he lies upon the booms, and raises himself upon his elbow to learn the occasion of the uproar; then muttering a curse at the Chinamen, he tries to compose himself again, but is compelled against his will to watch the progress of the vessel. As the junk is borne along the surface of the tide, basket after basket of crackers is raised aloft and the contents exploded, enveloping the vessel in a cloud of mist; while the tiny, sharp reports add to the harmony of the clanging brass. Thus the smoky boat proceeds, leaving

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behind her trains of fire, from the flaming papers thrown over her stern, and which float upon the water in her wake. At this scene a slight feeling of awe comes over you, which it is impossible to repress.24

Such impressions of the sounds of China, of noisy firecrackers and gongs, run like a leitmotif through the archive of  Western writing on the Canton trade. Downing’s report captures the compulsion of strange sounds: the sailor must watch the passing sampan “against his will.” His descriptions of the soundscapes and landscapes of the Whampoa anchorage appropriated the picturesque, but here he borrows critical language current in British aes­ thetics since the writings of Edmund Burke about transport through the sublime, the quality of sense experience that overwhelms and compels the receiver of mighty landscapes and deafening noise.25 He reports, in Burkean tones, a “slight feeling of awe . . . impossible to repress.” Western sailors sometimes confronted the authors of irritating sounds. For example, government officials traveled downriver from Canton to Wham­ poa in small junks to collect the Chinese tax on saltpeter, a component of gunpowder. Sailors called their boats “chop boats” after the “chop,” the docu­ ment that proved the tax had been paid.26 On board the chop boats, Down­ ing relates, “the gongs and cymbals are beat regularly at stated intervals, and make such an abominable clatter, that your head aches for hours after­ wards with the noise.” Sailors would “take the opportunity, when nobody is looking, to pelt the musicians with portions of yams or sweet potatoes, which causes them to remain quiet for a second, but they never fail to renew their clamour with double vigour, as if to spite their tormentors.”27 To those confined at Whampoa for days, weeks, or even months on end, strange noise seemed constant. Some of it came from miles away. Dur­ ing frequent religious festivals Downing felt that a male falsetto voice—­ probably originating from a theatrical performance at a nearby temple—­ followed him everywhere. “The sound . . . haunts you,” he wrote, “in so loud and piercing a key, that you may frequently distinguish it above every other sound in the vicinity. At Whampoa especially, I have been obliged to no­ tice it above the sound of all the kettle-­drums, gongs, and trumpets, which were in full operation at some distance inland on the adjacent shore, during the festivity of the new moon.” Sometimes the festivals went on for days, “during the whole of which, day and night, there is continual uproar, which may be heard for some miles in every direction.”28 Indeed, two villages near the river seemed to be in sonic competition: “there was . . . uproar on both sides of the river, as if each set of people were trying to make their exhibi­

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tion the more attractive.” Unable to sleep, Downing paced the deck of his ship: “The trumpets, drums, and gongs [sounding] across the water with a distinctness which made one wish they brought forth better harmony.”29 As a gentleman, Downing was at least free to leave the anchorage: he had every sympathy for those constrained to remain there. To one stuck on board ship at Whampoa, “the time appears to pass very slowly, and however much you may be amused by the manners of the natives, you soon prefer witnessing those which are of a quiet nature. To listen to Chinese music at all is far from agreeable, but to have it dinned into your ears for days together is intolerable.”30

Traveling Upriver Upriver toward the city the presence of Chinese sounds in Western ears intensified. Thousands of boats crowding the banks housed families whose members rarely went ashore (see fig. 2.3). Many worked on the river, includ­ ing barbers, who drew customers with the rasp of attention-­getting rattles. In China of the High Qing all male citizens were required to wear their hair in a queue: the sound was a constant reminder of that civic duty.31 The rattles were a component of a multilayered soundscape. James Johnson, a British naval officer who visited in the early 1800s wrote of traveling up­ river to “the din of the Chinese language on every side; the clangor of their gongs; the shrill notes of their music.”32 The American journalist Jeremiah N. Reynolds, whose reports of a “white whale of the Pacific” inspired Her­ man Melville, wrote of the “noise and bustle of business, combined with the heavy hum of a million of human voices.” The crowding on the river made for a “mazy labyrinth” amid “business, bustle, noise, confusion and the din of a thousand gongs.”33 In the early 1830s Franz Julius Meyen, a German botanist and protégé of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, traveled up the river the first time by night, apparently during a festival. He revels in the multimedia qualities of the Pearl River: “The glory of hundreds of thou­ sands of colourful lanterns . . . the busy activity of the huge mass of peo­ ple, the rockets, squibs, flares, and all kinds of fireworks, which were fired off, accompanied by the shouts of noisy crowds and the loudest and most horrid-­sounding instrumental music, as offerings to idols, gave the deep, dark night a truly fairy-­like quality.”34 Officers and officials traveled in style on “passage boats” that one traveler described as “little floating castles.”35 From aboard one Downing reports hearing “baskets of crackers which fire and pop close to your ears” and “the

f i gu re 2. 3   Shipping on the Pearl River off Honam Island. Anonymous, nineteenth century. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

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clash and clamour of gongs . . . [through which] you feel perfectly awed and overcome.” A new visitor might be forgiven, he writes, for thinking “he was at the entrance of Pandemonium.”36 The noise on the Pearl River echoed all the way back to London. A text printed to accompany a pano­ rama of Canton displayed by its creator Robert Buford at his purpose-­built theater in Leicester Square encouraged listeners to imagine the sound of what they saw. On the river, Burford reports, despite the “greatest polite­ ness” of all the traffic coming and going, “the noise of the music, gongs and other discordant sounds, defies description.”37 But not all the sounds on the river were so loud. William C. Hunter, writing later in the nineteenth cen­ tury, remembered the “gorgeously decorated” boats of the floating trade in prostitution, “their upper works entirely of carved open work in flowers and birds, with glass windows painted and gilt.” These were the “flower boats,” riverborne brothels (theoretically) off-­limits to Westerners.38 From within them, Hunter reports, came the soft music of the “kin [qin] or pe-­pa [pipa] . . . as well as sounds of revelry or the game mora.”39

In the Factories Before the warehouses of the foreign traders the main sonic impression would be noise of an enormous city in the background mixing with the sounds from the water. An anonymous correspondent in Jacob Abbott’s collection of miscellany China and the English reports the experience of first arriving at the Western factories, which were laid out in a line on the north bank of the river outside the walls of the city proper (see figs. 2.4 and 2.5). “After cruising up and down some time [on the crowded river],” he writes, “I at last found an opening in front of the factories, and determined to land, right or wrong.” The result was “no inconsiderable uproar, which was raised against me.”40 After landing he surveyed the scene, which was marked by “the singular habits and the variety of characters of the multi­ tudes.” These included “stupid, thick-­headed” Chinese, “staid and sedate” Parsees and Persians, and “supercargoes and other officers of the English and American ships” (who were spared his adjectives). Subaltern Britons (“Jack Tar”) “reeling about in a state of inebriation” are joined by “lascars or Malays on furlough” who are “cooking their rice and curry in the open air, growling and quarrelling with every one who approaches too near them.”41 In Abbott’s account, only the lascars (non-­European sailors from countries around the Indian Ocean) are accorded a sound.42 But it is not difficult to imagine the noise made by so many people coming together in so small a

f igu re 2. 4   William Daniell, A View of the European Factories at Canton, 1805–6, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

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fig u re 2 .5   A Plan of the City of Canton and Its Suburbs, ca. 1820. British Library, London.

space. Above this din Chinese gongs marked the time. Pehr Osbeck reported in the 1750s that they sounded in front of the factories every half hour in a four-­hour cycle, moving from one to eight gong strikes, then starting over.43 In this unfamiliar soundscape it might also have been possible to make out the familiar. Depending on the day, a listener might have heard the

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strains of amateur chamber music coming from one of factories. Direct re­­ ports of such music making are rare, but given the wide variety of musical activities elite Britons could experience in other settlements, it is likely that the all-­male residents of the Western factories at Canton pursued music in their spare time. Quality of performance was probably not their primary concern. The American consul Samuel Shaw reported in the late 1780s that “at the Danish factory, there is, every Sunday evening, a concert of instru­ mental music, by gentlemen of the several nations, which every body who pleases may attend.”44 The New-­York Magazine’s anonymous correspondent reported something similar ten years later: “At the English factory there is every Sunday evening a concert, where every body whom it pleases may at­­ tend. This is the only occasion on which there appears to be any thing like a general intercourse.”45 These two reports (if they are not actually the same one, given their similar wording) are rare indications of the performance of any kind of Western art music in Old Canton. The absence of women—­ who did much of the elite domestic music making in Europe and North America in this era—­was undoubtedly a factor. The relatively few Western residents (several hundred) with the wherewithal to attend concerts was probably another. It is interesting to note that the second report ascribes so much social importance to the Sunday concerts. Without them, the writer suggests, there would have been hardly any interaction among elite West­ erners apart from business. Especially toward the end of the period, a more contentious Western music was also audible—­if very faintly, for all the noise. Robert Morrison, the first British Protestant missionary in China, lived in Canton and Macao (at first under cover of working as a translator for the East India Company) from 1802 until his death in Canton in 1834, with one interruption. Faced with hostility from the Chinese authorities, in the entire period Morrison converted fewer than fifteen Chinese to Christianity. This disappointing result came despite enormous efforts that included a new translation of the Christian scriptures into Chinese, significant scholarly work, and the found­ ing of a school in Malacca to train missionaries in the Chinese language.46 In extracts from his journal, published posthumously in 1838 by his widow, Morrison reports that very early on he translated Bible passages into Chi­ nese and sang them to English hymn tunes with Chinese he was trying to convert.47 The next mention of hymn singing comes eighteen years later. By then Morrison led services at a British factory for small groups of (se­ cret) Chinese converts and like-­minded foreigners; these included “reading”

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hymns.48 At a service in 1833, a year before his death, Morrison writes that his small congregation (“eight persons exclusive of myself ”) sang hymns while a visiting “Taou-­priest” joined in.49 In 1834, four days before his death on August 1, and suffering from his final illness, he tells of a service for “old and young, domines, and workmen, and servants,” which was “for China a large congregation.” So large, indeed, that Morrison thinks it worth men­ tioning that “our hymns would be heard out of doors.”50 Morrison’s death corresponded with the beginning of the end for the Canton System, ush­ ered in the same year with the breaking of the East India Company’s mo­ nopoly on the British China trade. Only as Old Canton died was Christian singing first audible outside the small rooms where it had been confined. Of course Morrison also preached. The sonorous tones of his Low Church sermons would have been a constant presence in the factories for those who cared to make them out. But his would not have been the loudest voice. On days where business was transacted, in the factories themselves the sounds of languages intelligible and unintelligible raised in negotiations over goods combined Canton’s own pidgin English, a mixture of English, Portuguese, and Dutch, and the tongues of the negotiating parties: Mandarin, Can­ tonese, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Danish, and Arme­ nian.51 Reports of court cases in Old Canton offer a window on the linguis­ tic cacophony of life at the factories. William Hunter describes an elaborate three-­way misunderstanding that occurred in the course of a judicial in­ terrogation of a lascar sailor who had been found wandering in a nearby coastal province. Hunter relates that he and a few European colleagues at­­ tended the questioning of the lascar to relieve the boredom of remaining in Canton as the trading season wore down. There is a whiff of the theatrical about the scene: one of the members of the audience, a hong merchant, re­ marks as things get under way (“laughing in his sleeve”) that what is to come is “all the same sing-­song.”52 Hunter writes that it was “beyond my powers to discriminate” what language or languages the prisoner was speak­ ing: “Begalee and Malay were certainly recognisable,” Hunter writes, “but he indulged in so many other strange sounds that he might have been the man who went to the feast of languages and ran away with the scraps. The poor fellow, in his evident satisfaction at seeing foreign faces, was no doubt giving an account of his wanderings . . . but so confused were his words that they gave us rather an idea of what Babel might have been.”53 As long as the Canton System endured, Babel ruled its soundscape, underscored, perhaps, by occasional snippets of chamber music or preaching.

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The Sound of the Streets Most of the city of Canton was off-­limits to Westerners. A few streets around the factories, however, were open to more privileged visitors: sailors on the ships at Whampoa were allowed out only in groups (see fig. 2.6). Before the Treaty of Nanking the in-­between zone from the factories to the gates of Canton proper were one of the very few urban areas in China where Westerners could move freely. To Julius Meyen, the district around the fac­ tories looked like an exotic stage. “If one looks down one of the streets,” he writes, “it seems to be a long, thin theater equipped with hundreds of small pieces of scenery.”54 The narrow, crowded streets had a particular sound just as the river did. “Individuals make their bundles fast to the extremities of a bamboo [pole], the middle of which rests across their shoulders, and thus they move at a good pace, at every step crying out in an audible voice ‘Li! Li!,’ which is [a] species of music one is continuously regaled with in the streets of Canton,” wrote James Johnson, a Royal Navy surgeon who visited in 1805.55

fig u re 2.6   New China Street, Canton. Anonymous, early nineteenth century. Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

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Downing begins his description of a walk in the city with a comparison to London. In China, he writes, one hears “the same screeching and scream­ ing, the same discordant strains from broken kettle-­drums and penny trum­ pets, the same popping of crackers, and roaring of tumultuous laughter” as at home.56 Not only was the urban soundscape loud. James Johnson was struck by the sounds of a typical shop. There he heard the proprietor “chucking about the little balls [of the abacus] in the swan-­pan with one hand; hum­ ming the calculations in his discordant jargon, and noting down the result with the other hand.”57 The shopkeeper’s “discordant jargon” and the soft knocking together of the beads of his abacus echo Canton’s central activity in the era of the trade: weighing up commodities in cash. But it was mostly those at the bottom of the social scale—­the losers in the Canton System’s brand of global capitalism—­who shaped the sound­ scapes of the city. The noise of begging appears often in Western reports. Eric Hayot and others have written of visual interest in the Chinese poor, who were often the subject of a Western gaze that focused on their physical deformities and facial expressions of misery.58 Such accounts miss the sonic dimensions of Chinese poverty, which to judge from contemporary reports was loud. “The success of Canton’s beggars,” wrote Clarke Abel, who visited the city in 1818 after participating in Lord Amherst’s failed diplomatic mis­ sion to Beijing, “is closely connected with the skilful use of bamboo sticks, iron pans, musical instruments, and their own vocal powers.” Persistence was another strategy. “When they enter a house,” Abel writes, “they are never expelled until their object is gained.” Solidarity helped too. “Groups of them frequently unite,” Abel observes, “and set up a concert of all their instru­ ments, in one place.”59 Downing observed something similar: “With these wretched instruments in their hands they often congregate together, and produce an extemporaneous concert, much inferior to the worst with which we are regaled in the streets of London.”60 The presence of foreigners, Down­ ing remarks, encouraged even more noise. Canton’s shopkeepers seemed inured: “Whenever a foreigner is seen to enter a shop, the door is almost always surrounded by five or six of these miserable creatures. . . . The shop keepers themselves seem, by long habit, to have got over any dislike they may have had at first to these droning, monotonous sounds, so that they turn a deaf ear to them. They would let the beggars knock till doomsday . . . if they were not afraid of losing their [foreign] customers, who are rendered half frantic by the sound and would rush out of the shop to find some qui­ eter resting-­place.”61

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Karl Friedrich Neumann’s manuscript recollections of his first days in China are more sympathetic to the sound of China’s streets. When he ar­ rived in Macao in early September 1830 after six months at sea en route from London, he soon realized that his previous attempts to learn Chinese were adequate neither to the task of actually understanding the people he met nor to comprehending most written documents. The East India Com­ pany officials to whom he had letters of introduction, including Morrison, soon introduced him to the Portuguese Catholic community, who arranged for him to live in one of their cloisters and to take lessons in colloquial Chi­ nese from a Chinese novice.62 When he stepped out onto Macao’s streets for his first experience of a Chinese city, the first thing he noticed was its soundscape. Determined to take in everything that seemed different to him, he followed street sellers “who sold all sorts of goods in sharp tones [mit gellenden Ton],” and a procession made up of “loud, shrieking [krieschenden]” Chinese “who made a horrifying spectacle.” Led through the city by its sounds, he began to follow a blind beggar who carried a loud clapper in one hand and a stick in the other. He stopped “in front of every house singing and rattling until he was given a small contribution.” Neumann continues: “[He] sang with such a pleasant voice, that it was a true pleasure for me. I gave generously and wished for him to give the words, which he had sung, in written form. It was impossible, however, for us to understand each other.” Back at the cloister, Neumann asked his new teacher about what he had heard. The teacher promised to acquire for him a collection of all the folk­ songs commonly sung in southern China. The next day he returned with several such books: one included texts and the others musical notation. The books, Neumann noted, were specific to the area around Macao and came with a glossary of words and phrases in the local dialect. “What a mass of words that differ from the normal written language,” Neumann wrote, “must be in circulation in the different cities, areas, and provinces of the Chinese em­ pire, if a song collection used in a small place like Macao requires a glossary of 200 words and phrases.” Neumann bought several copies of the books.63 This purchase was one of the first Western attempts outside Beijing-­based missionary circles to document Chinese musical practices. These were the first of six thousand books Neumann would acquire during his eight-­month stay in China. On returning to Europe in 1831, he sold some of the Chinese books he acquired in Canton to the Prussian State Library (which had ad­ vanced him some of his travel costs). The rest he gave to the Bavarian State Library, which in return appointed him custodian. Several years later he was appointed the first professor of Chinese at the University of Munich, a

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position he held until his dismissal on political grounds in 1848. The music books are still in the Munich collection.64

Theater There seemed to be theater everywhere in Qing dynasty China. Évariste Régis Huc, a French missionary who lived in China beginning in the 1840s, wrote of China as “an immense fair, where, amidst a perpetual flux and reflux of buyers and sellers, of brokers, loungers, and thieves, you see in all quarters stages and mountebanks, jokers and comedians, labouring unin­ terruptedly to amuse the public.”65 Chinese theater was a complex practice that crossed boundaries that Westerners might have thought were natural or universal. It combined entertainment, religious observance, and statecraft: as David Johnson writes, “opera and ritual were parts of a single performance system.”66 Chinese people performed theater in private houses, guildhalls, and purpose-­built performance spaces that ranged from hand-­drawn carts to state buildings in imperial palace complexes. In Canton Westerners fre­ quently encountered theatrical performances in front of temples or other public buildings. An anonymous correspondent in the Asiatisches Magazin, a German periodical devoted to reports of Asia, reported seeing perfor­ mances in 1801 in front of “large Pagoda in the New [China] Street” (see fig. 2.5).67 No surviving description gives enough detail to identify precisely what such troupes performed. Nonetheless it is fair to speculate that West­ erners in Canton mostly heard earlier forms of the dramatic narrative genres that later were categorized as “Canton opera.”68 Performances often took place on a simple portable stage with minimal props and a small musical ensemble. The correspondent of the Asiatisches Magazin (identified by the journal’s editor Julius Klapproth as a “Danish businessman”) remarks that once one gets over the “monotony” of Chinese music’s five tones, Chinese theatrical music is “not displeasing” to the European ear.69 Neumann, who had months to explore the city, reports that he once had the “special honour” of participating, albeit involuntarily, in such a performance. A “large man, completely painted in red” sang “several improvised verses” apparently di­ rected, to the delight of his audience, at the foreigner in their midst (who didn’t understand Cantonese).70 Those less disposed to positive impressions of China as a whole often were especially irritated by theatrical music. Downing first experienced Chi­ nese opera at a village festival on Whampoa Island. He remarks that when men sing female roles “the harsh natural voice is altered, and a screeching,

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penny-­trumpet sound is uttered.” Cross-­dressing—­a fundamental element of Chinese theatrical practice—­irritated him in the extreme. “When you look at one of these lady-­actors,” he observes, “and notice the distorted faces he makes as he pours out this flood of crude, squeaking rubbish, you cannot fail to be seized with the greatest disgust, and to stop your ears mechani­ cally whenever you fancy it repeated.”71 Downing notes that the falsetto voice, “the characteristic feature of the Chinese comedy,” carried a long way. It is “often uttered in so loud and piercing a key,” he claimed, “that you may frequently distinguish it above every other sound in the vicinity.”72 Indeed, it was hearing the falsetto voice on his ship two miles from its source that inspired Downing and some companions to venture to the village in the first place. The British interlopers were soon chased back to the shoreline by an angry group of residents. But Downing stayed long enough to observe details on the performance. For instance, he found the division of labor be­­ tween musicians and actors curious: there were two stages, one for the ac­ tors (whose “rich, gaudy dresses . . . contrasted strangely with the plain blue and red garments of the spectators”) and one for the musicians, “with their noisy instruments.” The latter, he continues, “seemed to attract equal atten­ tion with the actors, as the people ran from one to the other nearly in pro­ portion to the noise created by the one or other party.”73 Westerners also experienced Chinese drama in more elite settings. The Asiatisches Magazin’s correspondent reports that wealthy businessmen—­ representatives of the Cohong—­often invited theater companies to per­ form in their houses, where “several days in a row historical dramas and shorter, often very charming intermezzos and operas” were given. “There is as a rule no shortage of battles, screaming, and noise; in this the Chinese exceed even us, despite the best efforts of our playwrights.”74 The German naturalist Meyen reported that in the 1830s Europeans invited to a per­ formance at the residence of the hong merchant Young Mowqua brought cotton wadding for earplugs “to protect themselves from Chinese music.” He reports that “in a neighbouring room there was a whole musical en­ semble with many outstanding singers, who performed during the entire dinner and gave a sort of opera.”75 He was astounded that the Chinese seemed not to register the “absolutely dreadful” noise. Indeed, “the Chinese took no notice of it, except when conversation stopped for a moment; then they listened to the music and usually noticed something humorous [in the performance] or something to remark upon.” The music went on for the whole banquet. Again the male falsetto drew special attention: it “sounded

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like a violent kind of screaming accompanied by the large metal bells, the ‘gong-­gong.’ ”76 There were also moments of humor. The British traveler William Hickey was invited to the residence of the hong merchant Pankeequa in the 1770s. Before the play visitors were treated to a dinner “dressed and served à la mode Anglaise, the Chinamen on that occasion using, and awkwardly enough, knives and forks, and in every respect conforming to the European fash­ ion.” The meal, which featured ample amounts of the “best wines of all sorts,” ended with a play, “with better music that I could have expected.” At one point “an English naval officer, in full uniform and fierce cocked hat, was introduced, who strutted across the stage, saying ‘Maskee can do! God damn!’ whereon a loud and universal laugh ensued, the Chinese quite in an ecstasy, crying out ‘Truly have much ee like Englishman.’ ”77 This time the cross-­dressing was cross-­cultural. At Pankeequa’s banquet the soundscapes of Chinese Canton and its West­ ern enclaves, largely unintelligible to their respective inhabitants, turned in on each other. Whereas in the polyglot soundscape of the factories un­ known languages were simply noise, across the river in the villas of the hong merchants a few words—­backed up with a “fierce cocked hat”—­came to life for both sides in the medium of theater. Among both Western and Chi­­ nese social elites, shared desire for profit merged with shared social diver­ sions and produced a kind of mutual recognition. But for the most part Europeans confronted with Chinese theater in Canton and its surround­ ings were repelled by its strangeness (and its volume). Neumann is once more an outlier here. In the archive of Western reactions to Old Canton’s sound worlds, voices like his are in the minority. As his older contempo­ rary Alexander von Humboldt had done in his travels in South America, Neumann the listener played the role of learned “bourgeois geographer,” open and curious about what he heard.78 Wandering the streets of Can­ ton’s international suburbs on his own, he experienced a fleeting moment of recognition.

Courtesans The Chinese authorities did not allow European women to accompany their husbands and fathers beyond Macao. Fleeting but consistent refer­ ences to prostitution in the literature on Old Canton indicate that some considered the absence of women within the Western enclave an invitation

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to libertine behavior by the men.79 Officials of the East India companies, especially junior ones, were often young and single: a few years’ service in Canton could make a man a considerable fortune if he survived the ex­ perience. Beyond their duties they were free to pursue their interests at lei­­ sure in a fascinating if narrowly prescribed world. Besides dealings with their Chinese counterparts, their only social interactions were with other West­ ern elites: officers, supercargoes, and high-­ranking visitors from the anchor­ age at Whampoa. When the trading season came to an end in late summer, the Chinese authorities required the gentlemen of the factories to return to their summer quarters in Portuguese Macao. The absence of  Western women made the factories an unusual space for performing and listening to music. In the elite circles of eighteenth-­century Britain, music making was a socially meaningful activity that permitted ac­ ceptable social interaction between genders. Young women and men alike, encouraged by a wide conduct literature, pursued music as an “accomplish­ ment” and an opportunity to experience luxury.80 Men often learned to play solo instruments like the violin, flute, or cello (and in Britain long into the eighteenth century, also the bass viol) while women favored the piano, on which they could perform both instrumental and vocal genres without nec­ essarily putting themselves forward as soloists or using their bodies in “im­ modest” ways.81 Elite Britons brought their mixed-­gender musical practices with them into the wider world. By the end of the eighteenth century, ow­ ing in large part to the presence of Western women, Calcutta and Bombay were thriving centers for socially elite Western music, from simple songs to challenging instrumental pieces by composers such as Joseph Haydn.82 But in Canton there were no Western women and no opportunities to make music in the way upper-­class Westerners were accustomed to. At least two British men, James Lind and Matthew Raper Jr., seem to have found a way around this problem. They found musically accomplished women among Canton’s high-­class courtesans. Lind, a Scots physician, vis­ ited Canton in 1766–­67 while serving as a surgeon aboard an Indiaman.83 Five years later, in 1772, he met music historian Charles Burney at a din­ ner at the Admiralty given by their mutual connection Lord Sandwich.84 Burney discovered from their conversation that Lind had made detailed observations about Chinese music while in Canton. Two years later Lind provided Burney with information on the subject that flowed directly into the “Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients” in Burney’s General History of Music. Among the materials Lind sent to Burney is a set of Chinese song texts (fig. 2.7).85

fig u re 2.7  The words of the songs in a Chinese play. Enclosed with James Lind to Charles Burney, November 11, 1774. Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection MSS 3, box 12, folder 884.

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The songs are from the narrative genre naamyam (“southern sound”). The title page calls the story “The Tale of the Dressing Case,” probably taken from a popular novel, “sung by a woman and her sister-­in-­law.”86 The text on the title page reads, “The Collection of Music Made by Women Accompany­ ing Themselves with a Wooden Clapper / A New Selection of Rare Naamyam Stories / The Tale of the Dressing Case / Collected [for] the Happy Blue-­Green Brothel.”87 In his letter to Burney Lind did not give a transla­ tion of the textbook’s cover or discuss the book’s wider context: it is hard to imagine that he would have done so given the source’s provenance. But it seems likely that the young, unmarried ship’s surgeon Lind gained at least some of his knowledge of Chinese music by experiencing performances of a sophisticated repertoire by female actress-­musicians who were also courtesans.88 Another of Burney’s correspondents was the company official Matthew Raper Jr., who arrived in Canton in 1768 and rose to chair the company committee there before returning to Britain in 1779.89 Raper commissioned paintings from local artists of Chinese musicians and musical instruments, some of which survive.90 On one such painting, of an erhu, he wrote in pencil, “The instrument I learnt to play on, it has two strings and is tuned in fifths, the greatest difficulty to affect a tune on it is on account of having no finger board you must press the strings very hard and draw the bow very lightly it is a very troublesome instrument to play on. I have performed 4 of their tunes as well as many English airs on it. & I have play [sic] on it in one of their bands” (see fig. 2.8).91 Raper’s note suggests that he was prob­ ably a cellist or bass viol player and that he had enough free time to learn to play a Chinese instrument and then explore the performance of Chinese music from the inside. As with Lind, it is most likely that Raper would have met Chinese musicians in the mixed-­gender context of Canton’s high-­end brothels. Lind and Raper were men of high social cachet. Lind went on to be­ come a fellow of the Royal Society, physician-­in-­ordinary to George III at Windsor, and at the end of his life a mentor to Percy Shelley when the young poet was a student at nearby Eton College.92 Raper likewise became a fellow of the Royal Society, was a leading figure in the Society of Anti­ quaries, and served as a vice president of the Bank of England.93 Both ex­ perienced Chinese sounds in the exclusive if morally dubious environment of Canton’s brothels. Neither seems to have rejected Chinese music on aes­ thetic grounds or to have treated it as “primitive” compared with their own music. Instead they saw it is a field to demonstrate their own cultivation.

f igu re 2. 8   “Yee-­yine [erhu].” Anonymous painting with pencil inscription in the hand of  Matthew Raper Jr., before 1778. Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

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Raper actively joined in the social practice of making music across daunting boundaries of language, culture, gender, class, and experience; Lind gath­ ered material evidence about Chinese music making without prejudice to its standing compared with his own. Both men found music in a mixed-­ gender environment, experiencing it much as their counterparts from the upper echelons of Canton’s trading families did. Instead of decrying the dif­ ferences between the musical practices they knew and what they found in China, Lind and Raper musicked in a world between China and the West.

Class and the Sound of  Western Labor Lancelot Dent, the princely businessman and first opium dealer in Can­ ton during the [eighteen] thirties, hosted anyone who wanted to join him at his table. The most diverse society, representing all peoples and pro­ fessions, came together in the English factory to break bread and enjoy his hospitality. I sat for months next to officers of the Anglo-­Indian army and the Royal Navy, with Spanish and Portuguese refugees, with business­ men from all lands and empires, with opium smugglers and missionaries, and listened to the informative conversation of this distinguished com­ pany.  When the gatherings were over, Launcelot came to me and said: “Professor, let’s sit down together, and talk about Europe and European-­ educated people. For all of my successful business ventures and huge profit I live here in a kind of exile; I find this sometimes difficult.” We the spoke in long detail about our European homeland, about its traditions and customs. I told him about the fascinating men and women whom I knew personally, and my friendly host replied with tales about the life and activities of the trading houses worth millions in India, England, and China.94

This passage, from the first pages of Karl Friedrich Neumann’s memoir, speaks of privileged Europeans listening to each other. It indicates a diffi­ culty with the history told in this chapter. Those with the means to report what they had heard in Canton—­most of them typical of the “distinguished company” at the extravagant dinners of the wealthy opium dealer Dent—­ shared a predictably privileged perspective. Julius Meyen, who visited a year after Neumann, went so far as to describe the English factory as a kind of scholarly institution: “The gentlemen [of the factory] are unlike the typi­ cal businessmen of other nations. . . . [T]hey busy themselves, following their muse in their free time, with the sciences.”95 Sir George Staunton,

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deputy to Lord Macartney, the British ambassador to China in 1792–­94, praised the gentlemen of the factory: “The nature and liberality of their emoluments [places them] above temptation.”96 This independence mat­ ters. Most Western listeners in Canton filtered Chinese sound worlds into social categories that they considered “objective,” yet these were inflected by their own understanding of class. The familiar sounds of “national airs” being performed by ships’ bands at Whampoa reassured the genteel ears of middle-­class travelers such as Charles Downing that after a long journey they had at last returned to a familiar sociomusical setting. But observers like Downing—­who intensely disliked the sound worlds of the millions of Chinese in whose midst he found himself—­rarely mention lower registers of non-­Chinese music making that must have been a constant presence in an anchorage where hundreds of European, American, and lascar sailors were confined to their ships for months at a time. It is as if the Western work­ ing classes in Canton—­and their numerous colleagues from other non-­ Chinese countries—­made no sound at all. Class prejudice crossed cultural boundaries. We have seen how William Hunter, an American supercargo, enjoyed an inside joke with his hong mer­­ chant colleague while the two of them, both men of privilege, listened to the cacophony of the failed interrogation of a lascar sailor (“all the same sing-­song”).97 Likewise, Downing again reports that foreign customers in the shops of Old China Street were “rendered half-­frantic” by the music of beggars.98 The sound of Canton’s poverty, which Downing implicitly com­ pares to London’s, literally drove genteel listeners to flight. In fact Downing, like most other Westerners intent on a ramble in Old Canton—­sets off into the urban soundscape “armed with a small stick” to protect himself from the city’s poor. For him distinctions of both class and race were marked by the threat of violence. The fusing of fears of the national “other” and the class “other” is not unexpected. Observers like Downing typically expressed un­­ ease about the sheer numbers of China’s laborers and the ever-­present spec­­ tacle of Chinese poverty. In Canton this came together with concerns about the threat posed by Western sailors, who vastly outnumbered the officers and trade officials whose voices make up the overwhelming majority of the Canton trade’s archive of memoirs and other reports.99 This chapter would thus be incomplete without an attempt to engage with Canton’s laborers and their sonic practices. What of the non-­Chinese working classes in Canton? How did they hear? What did they sound like? Who listened to them, and how? What kind of sounds did they live by and make? The few score of supercargoes, writers, missionaries, ships’ officers,

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and professional travelers in Canton up to 1839 were substantially outnum­ bered by the sailors living on ships at Whampoa, often in cramped and unsanitary conditions. Westerners in the factories often chafed at the re­ strictions imposed on them by Chinese regulations relating to foreigners, as Neumann’s description of Dent’s feeling of being in “exile” demonstrates. But their “ghetto”—­as the American historian Jacques Downs called it—­ was comfortable and luxurious.100 Historian Evan Lampe has argued that it would be more appropriate to describe the Canton factories in contem­ porary terms as a “gated community.”101 Downriver at Whampoa, what Lampe calls an “international working class” lived under shockingly different conditions. Mortality was alarm­ ingly high, and lack of discipline—­particularly drunkenness—­was a severe problem. Sailors at Whampoa drank great quantities of alcohol supplied by Chinese middlemen known as compradors.102 Drunken behavior by West­ erners was familiar to the Chinese. On his return to England Neumann translated a contemporary Chinese account of the recent history of the Pearl River Delta. “[The] foreigners or barbarians drink so much strong li­ quor,” Neumann’s Chinese author recounts, “that they are not able to stand on their feet; they fall down intoxicated, and before having a strong sleep, they cannot rise again.”103 Such dismissals are typically written from an out­ side perspective (European reports of drunken behavior are just as negative; for example, Johnson’s account of “Jack Tar’s” inebriation in front of the factories). The non-­Chinese working class’s impressions of their own daily lives and of the Canton trade in general are extremely difficult to capture.104 In the archive this chapter is based on, the sounds of the main component of Old Canton’s non-­Chinese working classes, the (non-­Western) lascars, appear only rarely. In Abbott’s China and the English, groups of the non-­ Chinese working classes, lascars, appear in front of the European factories “growling and quarrelling with everyone who approaches too near them.” Otherwise they are mostly silent. The Western working classes fare only mar­ ginally better. One of the only surviving sources in a worker’s voice is the memoir of the Scots sailor John Nicol, whose book on his years at sea just after 1800 is, according to Lampe, the only substantial report on the Canton trade written in a working-­class voice.105 Nicol has something to say about the noisy ship-­measurement ceremonies undertaken by the imperial inspec­ tor of maritime customs (the hoppo), but very little about the sonic world of his shipmates.106 A second earwitness to the everyday soundscapes of an East India Com­ pany ship was Karl Friedrich Neumann. Although as a scholar, a German,

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and a converted Jew he was something of an outsider to his upper-­class interlocutors such as Dent, Neumann—­invariably referred to as “Professor Neumann” by elite Westerners—­was not himself of the working classes. But he was certainly aware of the massive divide between gentlemen and sailors, having been forced by the circumstances of his passage to China to sign on as a common seaman on an Indiaman. On arriving in China he had feared that the East India traders and missionaries to whom he had letters of introduction would refuse to meet him on this account.107 Indeed, the pas­ sages in Neumann’s manuscript memoir about the sonic environment of rank-­and-­file sailors on the ship are a one-­off in the memoir literature of the Canton trade. As Neumann reports, life and work on the ship were regulated by sound. The workday began with the “shrill pipe” of the bosun (Schiffsmeister), whose pipe Neumann brings to life with a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “Hear the shrill whistle, which doth give order to sound’s confusion.”  Then the ship’s company assembled on deck, in silence. The first officer called the roll: “When a name is called its owner shouts ‘here.’ ” Indeed, Neumann, despite having no duties, being allowed his own cabin, and being invited to dine with the ship’s officers each day, was obligated to participate in the roll call several times “to keep up appearances.” The day’s work began. In good weather it took only a few sailors to sail the ship. The others were occupied with useful activities such as cleaning, ordering, and repair: “all of these, and the loading and unloading of cargo, are done in a certain rhythm.” Usually there was a musician involved “who sets the rhythm on the violin.”108 In port a common task was turning the windlass used the heave the anchor. Richard Henry Dana, in Two Years before the Mast, his contempo­ rary account of life on board a trading ship on the California coast, writes that “when heaving at a windlass, in order that they may heave together, we always have one to sing out, which is done in high and long-­drawn notes, varying with the motion of the windlass. This requires a clear voice, strong lungs, and much practice, to be done well.”109 Indeed, a well-­run ship required regular replenishment of its repertoire of work songs. Dana describes an encounter between his ship and a Boston merchantman whose crew included two “English man-­of-­war’s men”—­presumably deserters from the Royal Navy.  They brought with them “the latest sailor songs, which had not yet got about among our merchantmen.  .  .  . Battle-­songs, drinking-­ songs, boat-­songs, love-­songs, and everything else, they seemed to have a complete assortment of.”110 Other regular events on board, such as changes of watch, church services, and funerals, were delineated by bells. The funerals

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of common sailors—­two were lost on the Sir David Scott’s journey to Can­ ton, both presumably suicides—­began with solitary ringing, “miserable and abandoned, like [that] of a lonely churchyard.”111 The ship’s company stood in silence, on one side the sailors—­“a remarkable mixture of physiognomies from all zones, in colourful and un-­uniform clothes.” On the other side “all the ship’s gentlemen”—­more homogeneous—­were assembled. Even when the crew came together as one silent community, they stood in groups sepa­ rated physically and visually by class. But their lives were structured by the same bells. Neumann describes several instances of musicking aboard the Sir David Scott, for instance, after-­dinner singing by the officers, joined in port by their guests.112 The sailors had opportunities to make music too. Once, on an afternoon where work rules were relaxed, Neumann observed the sailors (“the big children”) making music for themselves. “The older [sail­ ors] dressed formally,” he writes. “The younger ones wanted to dance.” The ship’s “tall and hollow-­cheeked” fiddler was called on to play.  To Neumann’s great surprise, he chose the “Hunters’ Chorus” from Carl Maria von We­ ber’s opera Der Freischütz. What this meant to the sailors Neumann does not report. In him, however, “it awakened . . . an indescribable longing for friends and family at home.” He quotes from his diary, in which he remem­ bers writing during the “wild dancing”: “How this melody penetrates my soul, ach Germany, dear, beloved Fatherland.” The dancing soon gave way to an impromptu boxing match. Neumann writes that he was sure that the contestants, who “soon, to the amusement of the spectators” fought them­ selves into “the most severe aggression” would surely “have broken each oth­­ er’s necks” had they not been wearing padded gloves.113 In Neumann’s eyes the sailor’s body moving to music could swiftly be transformed into a body moving violently. Neumann’s experiences of dance on board the Sir David Scott were sim­ ilar to Dana’s aboard his second ship, the Alert, where the lower decks be­ came a dance hall. One evening “the mate came down into the steerage in fine trim for fun, roused the boys out of the berth, turned up the carpenter with his fiddle, sent the steward with lights to put in the between-­decks, and set all hands to dancing.”  The leaders were the youngest crew members, among them the tall youth Dana calls the “Cape Cod Boy,” who could dance “the true fisherman’s jig, barefooted, knocking with his heels, and slapping the decks with his bare feet, in time with the music.” Such dancing was not always voluntary. The ship’s mates would sometimes force the boys to dance by “haz[ing] them round with a rope’s end, much to the entertain­

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ment of the men.”114 Dana’s Cape Cod Boy was also a feared boxer. In a later chapter Dana describes how the Cape Cod Boy, whose name was Nat, found himself in a fight the ship’s petty officers staged with the younger and smaller “Boston Boy,” who was tired of Nat’s bullying. To settle the matter the master’s mate, in charge while the captain and his officers were ashore—­ summoned the entire crew to witness a bloody boxing match between the two. To Dana’s ears “the heavy blows . . . sounded so as to make one’s heart turn with pity.” It is easy to imagine precisely the same situation at Wham­ poa—­time for music and fighting in the absence of the ship’s officers. In the age of the Canton trade sound regulated the work and leisure of the Western maritime working classes. It would have been the same in Old Canton, perhaps with a repertoire wider than the one Neumann describes, thanks to opportunities to exchange materials with sailors from the dozens of other Western ships anchored there.115 The presence of so many work­ ers from across the globe in so small a space would have guaranteed a rich and varied palette of musical expression. The anchorage would have echoed during the day with the sounds of song and instrumental music coming from the Western ships, which would have accompanied the labor that filled the time at Whampoa as cargo was loaded and unloaded, repairs were under­ taken, and ships were cleaned. All too often the lonely tolling of bells from sailors’ funerals would have mixed in. In moments of leisure, when the crew was released from the rhythm of the ship’s daily discipline, a passing lis­ tener would have made out less regimented sounds of wild dance tunes, feet striking the deck ever faster, and the animated shouts that went with the dangerous blows of fists.

Imperial Earwitnesses Valorisation must occur; sound as a dimension of human activity and human agency cannot be left out of the socio-­cultural equation. richard leppert , “Reading the Sonoric Landscape”

This chapter has traveled through Canton’s soundscapes from Whampoa upriver to the foreign factories, then back again. The earwitnesses who made up its archive heard everything from bands on Western ships performing familiar melodies to the piercing falsetto of male performers in Canton opera wafting across the water from festivals in neighboring villages. On the Pearl River they were overwhelmed by the voices of the multitudes who lived in the enormous city, rising over the sounds made by thousands of

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Cantonese who lived on the river itself. They made out the noisemakers of barbers touting for customers, lutes on the pleasure boats of prostitutes, and the high-­pitched voices of children whose families never set foot on land. The Western factories brought together unusual combinations of the world’s languages as polyglot traders carried on the Canton System’s busi­ ness. On occasion other Western sounds intruded, sotto voce, including hymns from officially forbidden acts of Christian worship, Low Church sermons, and amateur chamber music. In the streets behind the factories travelers heard Chinese traders hawking wares in Canton pidgin mixed with the banging and singing of the city’s numerous beggars and the exu­ berant noise of theatrical performances. Across the water hong merchants treated their guests to extensive renditions of opera, employing the same theatrical players who had just been performing on the streets. Sometimes their Western guests, stunned by the noise, brought cotton earplugs to the luxurious dinners. To turn down the volume was to exert a modicum of control. Meanwhile, back at Whampoa, members of the Western maritime working class made their own soundscape: musicking, dancing, and fight­ ing. Their elite compatriots hardly heard them. In Old Canton Western listeners’ reactions to what they heard ranged from disgust to mere dislike to (mostly in the case of softer or more famil­ iar music) interest, recognition, and pleasure. The vastness of the city and the juxtaposition of different sonic registers (crowd noise, hammering, bells, voices screaming, rattles, and softer music) was overpowering. Some listen­ ers reported transport, wonder, and a compulsion to listen further. Those fa­ miliar with the writings of Edmund Burke would have recognized the sub­­lime, the state of being overcome by sensory impression. Sublimity, of course, is also a common trope of Orientalist imaginings of the non-­Western other. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Chinese art went from being considered the epitome of elegance and sophistication to being seen as al­ together more threatening and even “monstrous.”116 On the other side of the world some Western ears found themselves confronted with what must have seemed the outer limit of sonic strange­ ness. They tried to structure its difference. If to locate sounds was to locate oneself, most of the time Westerners reacted to the different soundscape of China by distancing themselves from it. At the same time they were so drawn by the power of the different that they couldn’t stop listening. Down­ ing called the soundscape of the Pearl River “Pandemonium itself ”—­and couldn’t turn away from it. Imperial ears, it turns out, were different from imperial eyes. The imperial eye sorts into categories what it desires to com­

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mand. It can look on with sympathy, but also with prurience. What makes the eye different is that it can rest, move to another part of the picture, and come back later. It has an agency that the ear lacks. The imperial ear is at once fixated by the sensory power of the audible—­it cannot “look” away—­and trapped in listening’s temporal tracks. “Music invades man’s time,” wrote Jacques Attali.117 To Western ears the sounds of difference sometimes unfolded in sequence: the beggar started another song, the fire­ works got louder, the opera moved on to another scene.118 But sometimes the sounds of China came all at once. Whatever the order, Western listen­ ers could hardly escape the questions the soundscapes of Old Canton were asking. Who are you? How do you sound? Do your poor sound the same? Is the sound of making money any different in London than it is here? In many cases the answer to the last question must have been “not re­ ally.” Downing makes the comparison explicit. In his account and others one gets the impression that Canton, for all its strangeness, was the sonic doppelgänger of the metropolis on the Thames. London, after all, had many of the same features: deafening crowds, noisy docklands, languages from everywhere, outdoor theaters, riotous sailors—­and noisy poor.119 Such par­ allels, and the familiarity they engendered, perhaps helped keep the Can­ ton System going. Those who profited most from it—­the Western traders, the Chinese who lived from their business, the hong merchants, Chinese officials—­all could and did listen to each other and listen together. As Wil­ liam Hickey heard from his hong merchant colleague, it was “all the same sing-­song,” as long as the money kept coming. China’s volume was China’s power. As long as China was so loud and Western earplugs so unevenly distributed, its subjugation would remain only an aspiration. Yet Western earwitnesses’ steadily increasing fixation on the ugliness of Chinese sounds—­compare Lind’s neutral accounts of Can­ ton opera in the 1760s with Downing’s disgust seventy years later—­betray a change of perspective. In the world of musical labels, “ugly” is a prelude to “abnormal.”  The uglier Chinese sounds became, the less worthy of respect their makers sounded. The Chinese poor, for instance, slipped into the same role assigned to the poor at home.120 Something needed to be done about both. No longer to be ironically celebrated as in Hogarth’s caricatures, the poor needed at best to be helped, at worst to be silenced. Neumann’s aes­ thetic delight in the songs of a Macao beggar was already far out of step with the attitudes of his fellow visitors to the Pearl River delta. In partner­ ship with the silencing comes the projection of  Western sonic sensibilities. Morrison’s tiny company of hymn singers would soon be calling a much

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louder tune. Empire entails the metropolis disciplining the sounds of the periphery and then turning them down—­or drowning them out.121 In Old Canton the West had always made its own sounds, but as Sino-­Western relations deteriorated their tone changed. Morrison’s hymns were the be­ ginning, as were the sentimental performances of European music by ships’ bands at Whampoa. By projecting their music into the quiet evenings they took possession of the soundscape, much as Downing wished he could take possession of the landscape by galloping a horse across it.

t h r ee

Charles Burney Discovers China

C

Charles Burney’s China Project

harles burney was a public-­s phere intellectual, vora­ cious reader, prolific correspondent, political animal, musical power­ house, man of politics, father of a famous and talented daughter, extra­ ordinary traveler, professional organist, and man of science (or “natural philosophy”).1 Today he is remembered as an impassioned listener and in­­ terlocutor whose impressions, preserved in two volumes of travel writing, paint an unparalleled portrait of European musical life in the 1770s.2 Both books were by-­products of Burney’s preparation for his four-­volume General History of Music, published in stages from 1776 to 1789.3 The General History was never intended to be a history of only European music, so in this key period of his career Burney turned also to China. Then at the height of his powers as listener and thinker, he swiftly discovered that Chi­ nese music demanded a lengthier treatment than he could afford to give it. It was not until 1807, when he was eighty-­one years old, that he summed up his thought in the article “Chinese Music” in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature.4 This chapter and its continuation (chapter 5) explore Burney’s long en­ gagement with China, which scholars have mostly overlooked.5 Burney ap­ proached Chinese music in his usual eclectic fashion. When he began his China project in the early 1770s, knowledge about Chinese music in the West was limited to descriptions in encyclopedias and dictionaries based on reports from Catholic missionaries.6 In addition, as I discuss in chap­­ ter 1, some materials originating from the French Jesuit Joseph Amiot had circulated in French musical circles. In fact, Burney owed his introduction to the subject to this Franco-­Chinese network. He soon began a program of independent research. He talked with British travelers who had been

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to China and corresponded with musical Europeans there via a contact in Canton, soon acquiring more empirical information than any previous Eu­ ropean writer on Chinese music working outside the country. As a result, he realized that the General History would not offer enough space to ad­ dress Chinese music adequately. Burney reserved a place for it in a separate project on “national music” that he never completed.7 Soon after the publication of the first volumes of the General History, Amiot’s extensive study of Chinese music was published in France.8 Ami­ ot’s writings, previously available only in manuscript, were an enormous advance on the quantity and quality of material available in Europe on Chi­ nese music and its history. They did not render Burney’s efforts moot: he continued to gather material.  The returning members of the British dip­ lomatic mission to China of 1792–­94 (the Macartney Embassy), in whose preparations Burney was directly involved, offered rich and detailed ac­ counts of Chinese music. Some of their information was gathered in re­ sponse to specific questions Burney had given them before they left. In 1802, when Burney finally began to write his article “Chinese Music” for Rees’s Cyclopaedia, he had been collecting material for more than thirty years. In this sense Burney’s China project was similar to Rameau’s dia­ logic encounter with Chinese musical thought. It unfolded over decades and left—­at least notionally—­room for Chinese opinions, both as voiced by Amiot and as observed by Burney’s agents on Macartney’s staff. Yet for all this vigorous collecting, Burney never heard a note of Chinese music performed by a Chinese musician. This chapter and its companion explore Burney’s contribution to West­ ern knowledge about Chinese music around 1800. They trace his integra­ tion of China into his broader view of how music history works.9 China, I will argue, loomed larger in Burney’s work than scholars have so far acknowl­ edged. Indeed, the energy Burney invested in investigating Chinese music signals the importance he attached to it. Recent scholarship has drawn at­ tention to his engagement with non-­European music more broadly, pri­ marily through the experience of his son James, a junior officer on James Cook’s second voyage. As Vanessa Agnew argues, Burney’s object in his travels (real ones to Europe and vicarious ones to the South Seas) was an “Orphic” encounter with true musical art.10 As Agnew explains, Burney’s interest in such “original” music was rooted in his diffusionist idea of mu­ sic’s global history. Like most other historians of his generation, he assumed that music spread across the globe from one original source deep in the past, and that certain “primitive” peoples might possess this music in their living

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present. Journeys like his son’s voyage with Cook to Polynesia might lead to this source, and listening there might offer clues about how the earliest human music sounded. For all of his direct experience of Chinese musical materials, Burney never overcame this perspective. These chapters explore how he engaged with the sophistication and antiquity of Chinese music while at the same time leaving unchallenged the idea that Western music was superior and more cultivated. More broadly it asks, What can Burney’s engagement with China tell us about the entanglement of European mu­ sical culture in the broader Western imperial and colonial project in the second half of the eighteenth century? Is Burney’s view of Chinese music a straightforward document of (proto)-­colonial aural desire, of  “imperial listening”? Or does it bear traces of a more complex encounter?

To China via France, 1771 Burney’s long imaginary journey to China started in Paris. He traveled through France twice in 1770 on his way to and from Italy. Burney made this journey, and the one to Germany two years later, in order to gather material for his General History of Music. The reports he published of both trips made his reputation as a writer and smoothed his way into elite circles in British letters, such as the one around Samuel Johnson.11 He always in­­ tended these expeditions to be more than a tour of Continental archives, for the archive was not the only place Burney did music history. He was an inspired conversationalist and counted on using this talent to find part­ ners who could aid his research. He drew many insights from interesting people he met through a large number of intermediaries. His objective was only partly antiquarian—­to uncover new information about past musics. It was also to explore how people in the places he visited, and in places far away, experienced and made music in the present. In the introduction to the account of his travels in Italy, Burney compared his writing to the usual descriptions of the Italian visual arts familiar from countless records of the Grand Tour. “Not a single picture, statue, or building has been left un­ described, or an inscription uncopied,” Burney writes, “yet . . . music and musicians have been utterly neglected.”  There is a difference between music and the other arts: “Music still lives in Italy, while most of the other arts speak a dead language.” Thus Burney based his history on more than just the information found in books, which are “in general, such faithful cop­ ies of each other, that he who reads two or three, has the substance of as many hundred.”  To understand the history of music in Italy, the wellspring

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of good music all over Europe, Burney concludes, “I determined to allay my thirst for knowledge at the source . . . to hear with my own ears, and to see with my own eyes: and if possible, to hear and see nothing but mu­ sic.”12 Although he never heard Chinese music in performance, from the start Burney experimented with its sounds by attempting to play Chinese instruments himself. This hands-­on approach shaped his attitude toward China’s music from his first encounter with it to the completion of his ar­­ ticle for Rees’s Cyclopaedia thirty-­six years later.13 Burney arrived in Paris on his way to Italy on June 11, 1770. As was his practice in every city he visited, he began by delivering letters of introduc­ tion, seeking out a banker, and working in local archives. It took him another week, until June 18, to deliver a letter of introduction from his friend the dramatist and impresario David Garrick to Jean-­Baptiste-­Antoine Suard (1733–­1817) at the latter’s office at the Gazette de France.14  The bourgeois Suard, whom Robert Darnton called “a leading candidate for a representative philosophe of the High Enlightenment,” had begun his career twenty years before as a translator of English literature into French—­although accord­ ing to Burney he spoke no English.15 At their first meeting, according to Burney, he and Suard had “a long conversation on the subject of my voyage.” This would have included Burney’s outlining his plan for the General History, which was to begin with a survey of ancient music. Suard seized on this aspect of Burney’s work. He recommended that he consult Pierre-­Joseph Roussier’s recently published Mémoire sur la musique des anciens, which Bur­ ney had just purchased but not yet read, and invited Burney to dine at his house the following Thursday with Abbé François Arnaud (1721—­84), an expert on the music of antiquity.16 For many years Arnaud had been a member of the Académie des in­ scriptions et belles-­lettres. Founded in 1663 to study historically accurate ways of honoring the French monarchy on medals and coins, the Acadé­ mie des inscriptions soon became the home of archaeological and histori­ cal research in France, and as such it was a key battlefield in the various campaigns of “ancients” versus “moderns” that shaped French intellectual life in the decades around 1700.17 In midcentury the academy’s remit ex­ panded to include studies of non-­European civilizations with a particular focus on China, reflecting the significant French presence among Euro­ pean missionaries then in Beijing. There was a direct connection between the Académie des inscriptions and the Jesuit father Joseph Amiot in Bei­ jing. Amiot corresponded intensively with the Académie’s secretary, Jean-­

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Pierre de Bougainville (1722–­63), until the latter’s death in 1764 and then with Henri Bertin, one of Louis XV’s ministers.18 Arnaud had been aware of Amiot’s manuscripts since at least the late 1750s, when he had assisted Rameau in the older musician’s attempts to add Chinese music theory to his universalist theories of  harmony.19 Arnaud had a hand in disseminating two of Amiot’s manuscripts in particular. The first was a translation of the Gue yuejing chuan (Commentary on ancient Chi­ nese music) by Li Guangdi (1642–­1718). The second was an original essay by Amiot titled “La musique moderne des Chinois.”20 In 1760, just after the pub­ lication of Rameau’s “Nouvelles réflexions,” Arnaud published a summary, the “Commentary on Ancient Chinese Music,” in the Journal étranger.21 In 1769 Arnaud reprinted the article in a collection of essays he edited with Suard, the Variétés littéraires, ou Recueil de pièces tant originales que traduites, concernant la philosophie, la littérature et les arts.22 This adaptation was later indirectly plagiarized by Burney’s rival Johann Nikolaus Forkel in a lengthy review of Amiot’s work in Forkel’s Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1784 (see chapter 6 below).23 Arnaud’s summary of Amiot’s translation of the “Commentary on An­ cient Chinese Music” mainly reflects his interest in comparisons between Chinese music theory and the music of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. He shared this perspective with Roussier (1716–­90?), whose Mémoire sur la musique des anciens Suard had suggested to Burney. Roussier drew heavily on Chinese music theory as reported by Amiot, but he used it to pursue his own agenda. Whereas Rameau considered overlapping elements of ancient Greek and Chinese music theory to be evidence that both reflected the uni­­ versal physical truth of the triple progression, Roussier entertained more radical ideas. He claimed in his Mémoire that both Chinese and Greek music theories, in particular their constructions of the space of the octave, were partial rediscoveries of the musical mysteries of ancient Egypt.24 In­ deed, it was Roussier who eventually edited a second text of Amiot’s—­this one (confusingly) titled Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que modernes—­for publication in a larger series of Jesuit studies of China, the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeures, les usages des Chinois par les missionnaires de Pékin.25 Burney’s encounter with the Suard circle in Paris put the problem of Chinese music on his scholarly agenda. At one of the next stops Burney got the chance to meet one of Europe’s leading sinophiles, Voltaire, at his residence near Geneva.26 Voltaire valued China for its supposed cultural

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refinement and its advanced social and political structures, which included a disinterested class of administrators chosen by ability and not by birth (Europeans called them mandarins).27 One reason he did this was to de­ stabilize European historians’ long tradition of emphasis on the Hebrew scriptures as the West’s primary historical text.28 Voltaire made China, not the ancient Near East, the starting point of his own influential “general” or world history. In addition, Voltaire made heroes of the arts and sciences, in­ stead of great leaders and their conquests, the primary agents of his history, which he wrote on a global scale. Voltaire’s historical narratives are stories about peoples rising and falling based on their creative powers. Some ideas succeed, others do not.29 This approach had a profound effect on Burney and, as we shall see, on his ultimate verdict on Chinese music. China appears not to have figured in Burney’s travels in Italy. After leav­ ing Italy in late November he returned to England by way of Paris. On this visit he met another of his heroes: Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. On his first visit he had missed Rousseau, whose writings (particularly the Dictionary of Music) he fervently admired. This time he found Rousseau at his modest apart­ ment in the rue Grenelle.30 Burney’s extensive account of their encounter in his diary, left out of the published account of his travels, conveys Rousseau’s well-­known preference for Italian music and his interest in ancient music history. Twenty years earlier, in the querelle des bouffons, Rousseau had bit­ terly condemned French music as too cultivated. The more “advanced” the music, the less democratic, less authentic, and more decadent the society. As we saw in chapter 1, Rousseau, who otherwise had little good to say about China, had praised Chinese music in the Dictionary. Rousseau imagined Chinese music to be like the music he and his followers in the querelle ap­ proved of. It seemed to him to display more Italian melodic authenticity and less French harmonic decadence. His construction of  Chinese music—­ and any other supposedly ancient music—­thus sits directly in the center of the issues raised by the querelle.31 At their meeting, Burney showed Rous­ seau his plan for the General History, which at that point still included a section on “national music.” Burney reports that Rousseau exclaimed, “Ah, that is good—­it is what I waited for!”32 Like Voltaire, Rousseau would also return, many years later, in Burney’s final assessment of Chinese music. On his last day in Paris Burney returned to the Suards’ salon. Arnaud was not in town, but he had left a Chinese instrument from his collection for Burney to see. “It is in a form like our sticado [a kind of  hammered dul­ cimer],” Burney wrote in his diary; “there are but 17 notes on it—­It has no semitones that I could find, and but five sounds from a note to its octave.”33

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exampl e 3.1   The gamut of a Chinese instrument. Transcribed from Charles Burney, A General History of Music (1776), 38.

In the draft memoir Burney includes a transcription of three of its octaves (example 3.1). “The Abbé thinks this scale to be that of Pythagoras,” Bur­ ney concludes. Here Burney sets the terms for his future engagement with Chinese music. The first Chinese instrument he encountered was similar to a European instrument, the hammered dulcimer, found most often in non­ elite settings. Its compass and scale seemed incomplete compared with the diatonic Western scale. Finally, and crucially, Burney’s introduction to the instrument at the hands of the professional intermediaries Suard and Arnaud came with the suggestion that it was used in present-­day Chinese music mak­ ing. Burney, thinking in Rousseauvian terms, seems to have concluded that the Chinese music of his day corresponded to a long-­lost  Western antiquity. The dinner ended on a Chinese note. Burney stayed late so as not to miss the delivery of a new poem by Voltaire satirically addressed to the Chinese emperor (Épître au roi de la Chine) “with his own [Voltaire’s?] corrections.” The poem was brought directly from the post house by Suard’s junior col­ league Jean-­François de la Harpe (1739–­1803), a disciple of Voltaire’s and editor of the Mercure de France, who later played a role in the last of the eighteenth-­century querelles, the one between the Gluckistes and the Picci­ nistes. After having one of his secretaries transcribe the poem “for the sake of the corrections,” Suard gave it to Burney to keep. Burney left for London early the next morning.34 The wheels were already turning in Burney’s historical imagination. Writ­­ ing from London, he asked Suard to convey his regards to Arnaud and to say that “I long very much for another musical conversation with him; which would only make me wish for a thousand more.”35 Burney had a particular interest in the instrument Suard had shown him. “I should be extreamly [sic] obliged to [Arnaud],” Burney continues, “for the exact scale of that Chinese Instrument you were so kind to shew me, as the few notes it con­ tains in Octave have given rise to some thoughts & experiments upon other wild national Musics than the Chinese, which then ascertained and digested I shall have great pleasure in Communicating to M. L’Abbé.”36 The instru­ ment itself, one supposes, had most likely come directly from Beijing via Amiot and his correspondents in the Académie des inscriptions. Burney,

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perhaps without knowing it, had been drawn into complex conversation about Chinese music, and China writ large.

James Lind: Burney’s First Ears in China Half a year after Burney ended his first round of travels, Captain James Cook returned from his first voyage to the South Seas. Cook enjoyed a reputation as Britain’s leading maritime navigator. In 1768–­71 he led an ex­ pedition supported by the Royal Society to Tahiti, what is now New Zea­ land, and Australia. His ship was staffed with naturalists and other scien­ tific observers, including the botanist Joseph Banks.37 The voyage would soon become celebrated through its treatments in the literary genre of the travelogue. Burney, whose own account of his Italian tour was published in April 1771, was soon drawn into Cook’s circle.38 The two met in the winter of 1770–­71 at the country estate of  John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich. Sandwich, then in his second term as first lord of the Admiralty, and one of the most powerful military administrators in mid-­eighteenth-­century Britain, had helped Cook organize his voyage.39 He was also a keen anti­ quarian and amateur musician: the Academy of Ancient Music grew out of concerts he organized. Burney, whose Italian travelogue had generated sig­ nificant critical and public interest, introduced Sandwich to the writer John Hawkesworth, who Burney thought would make a good editor of the offi­ cial account of Cook’s voyage. Sandwich invited Burney and Hawkesworth to meet Cook and Banks at the earl’s country house in Hitchingbrooke, Cambridgeshire, in July 1771.40 Burney, never shy about patronage, used the meeting to approach Cook about securing a place on the next voyage for his son James Burney, a young naval officer. At the time of this meeting the elder Burney was beginning to organize the materials he had gathered in France and Italy, including the impres­ sions of Chinese music he had received from playing Arnaud’s instrument. The new contact with Cook and Banks, however, was to take Burney’s in­­ terest in non-­European music in a wholly new direction. The younger Bur­­ ney was eventually appointed second lieutenant on the Adventure, the sister ship of Cook’s Discovery. In 1774 he returned safely from Cook’s second circumnavigation. On the voyage he collected firsthand information on mu­ sical practices in the places the expedition visited. These experiences were to have significant consequences for Charles Burney’s ideas about non-­Western music. Vanessa Agnew and David Irving have written about the problems this firsthand information raised for Burney’s vision of global music history.41

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One significant challenge was the discovery, reported in detail by James Burney, that the natives of what is now New Zealand sang music in parts. Burney, along with most of his contemporaries, had assumed that “simple” societies made music simply, and that therefore harmony and polyphony (as Agnew points out, the terms were often used interchangeably) were techniques reserved for more “cultivated” peoples. In the first phase of Burney’s work on the General History these concerns lay in the future. By late May 1771 he seems to have dropped the idea of including a section on “national music” in the first volume of the project.42 Over the winter of 1771–­72, spurred on by the popularity of the Italian Tour, Burney continued with work on the General History. He soon decided to travel once more to the Continent, this time to German-­speaking coun­ tries, in search of further archival material and musical experiences. In the first days of July 1772, just before leaving London for Dover, Burney met the Scots physician James Lind at a dinner Sandwich hosted at the Ad­ miralty in London.43 Lind, who worked as a surgeon aboard an East India Company ship, had spent a season in Canton a few years before, and the two fell into conversation about China and Chinese music.44 Burney left for Germany the next day and did not return to the subject of non-­Western musics for another two years. On September 19, 1774, in a letter to Lind, Burney mentioned the dinner and recalled that they had spoken about sim­­ ilarities between Scots and Chinese pentatonic scales: “I think you told me,” Burney wrote, “that the Chinese have a kind of musical drama, and that their melodies very much resembled the old Scots tunes. Have I permission for quoting your authority in this circumstance?”45 At this point Burney urgently needed help. After returning from Ger­ many he published a second travelogue, with success similar to that of the first. He then returned to the General History, which he funded by subscrip­ tion. He had promised that the first volume of the General History would reach subscribers by the end of 1774. By the time of his letter to Lind, de­ spairing that he would be defeated by the subject of ancient music, he had sought refuge in the country house of his friend Thomas Twining, who was doing his best to help.46 The problem was not lack of material but, as Roger Lonsdale points out, the challenge of not boring the large general audi­ ence he had gained from his tour books with too learned a disquisition on ancient music.47 This was all the more urgent because Sir John Hawkins, a drier writer than Burney, was preparing his own substantial music history.48 As Burney wrote to Twining, “I could wish to have my Book so divested of Pedantry and Jargon that every Miss, who plays o’ top o’ the Spinet should

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make it her manual.”49  The solution Burney hit on was to structure the dis­ cussion of ancient music around the concepts of mode and scale in a stand-­ alone opening section, “The Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients.”50 Lind’s offhand comments about the similarity of Scots and Chinese melodies—­a concept easily understood by a polite audience—­apparently formed part of Burney’s rhetorical strategy for blowing the antiquarian dust off discussions of ancient music. They also offered a way out of a his­ toriographical conundrum: how to understand the “development” of music history on a global scale, from the modes of the ancients to the “advanced” harmony and counterpoint of the present. “I think you likewise said they [the Chinese] have no music in parts,” Burney wrote to Lind, “either mov­ ing in different melodies, or in counterpoint?”51 Then Burney arrives at his central question (“the fact . . . of which I am most immediately in want”): “whether [the Chinese] scale moves in pure diatonic without semitones, as has been asserted by many writers, and which a Chinese instrument that I saw at Paris, in the possession of the Abbé Arnaud, in a manner con­ firmed.”52 Burney then describes the instrument and transcribes two pen­ tatonic scales before concluding that in his experience “it is impossible to play any melody from these scales which will not resemble that of the an­ cient Scots.” Burney closes the letter with further queries: “Is music much cultivated among [the Chinese]? . . . [Have] you had any opportunity of proving whether the European melody and harmony are more grateful to their ears than their own? Have they any notation?”53 Lind, who was living in Edinburgh at the time, responded to Burney in a long letter dated November 11, 1774.54 Although it begins with a protesta­ tion of musical ignorance, Lind’s letter, complete with musical examples and extensive examples of Chinese musical materials in print and manu­ script, is one of the earliest surviving firsthand descriptions in English of Chinese musical practices. Lind starts with detailed discussion of Chinese theatrical practices. “All the plays which are exhibited at Canton are Musi­ cal Dramas,” he writes, “such as our Beggars’ [sic] Opera.” There is no short­ age of opportunities to experience Chinese music, Lind continues, since the Chinese “are every day performing them in the Streets, in their Temples, and on board their Junks upon their arrival from a Voyage, when their [sic] are generally a succession of Plays carried on day and night for two or three days without intermission.” All performances are public “except when per­ formed in a private home.” Lind concludes that the “Chinese who speak English call a Play a Sing Song which name applies overall to Musical Drama.”

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exam pl e 3.2   “Highland Tune” and “Chinese Tune.” Transcribed from James Lind to Charles Burney, November 11, 1774. Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection MSS 3, box 12, folder 884.

Chinese music, he continues, has “no parts, an Octave is sometimes in­­ deed introduced, and [one] of their Instruments, the Chinese Organ, is ca­­ pable of playing at one time several unisons.” Lind then elaborates his the­ ory, which Burney would go on to appropriate, that Chinese music sounds much like the music of Scotland. “Some of their Music,” he writes, “but I cannot say whither all, resembles very much that of the Highlands of Scot­ land.” He provides evidence in the form of transcriptions of a Scots melody and a Chinese melody (example 3.2). He concludes by reporting that “the Chinese are much pleased by a simple Scotch tune, and with them only; other music being much above their comprehension.” The idea of a Sino-­Scots musical affiliation may seem absurd, but as we shall see, Burney was to welcome it warmly.55 It is rhetorically of a piece with Roussier’s claim that Chinese and Egyptian musics were related. One reason Burney reacted to it so favorably seems to be that he conceived of the unwritten chapter on “national music” as being primarily about the mu­ sics of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. During the first period of work on the General History he corresponded with experts on Irish music such as Gar­ ret Wesley, Earl of Mornington and professor of Music at Trinity Col­ lege Dublin (his son Arthur became the first Duke of Wellington).56 To

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explain Chinese music, Burney seems to have hit on the idea of placing the Chinese, by way of a local metaphor, in a framework he was struggling to develop in the General History. Comparing Chinese and Scots music illustrated China’s role in global music history in terms his readers (“every Miss” with a piano) could relate to. By associating the Chinese with the nearby Scots—­subjects of latent political anxiety and increasing Roman­ tic idealization—­he was able to direct attention away from China’s poten­ tial role as a competitor to the West in the area of musical refinement. The Scots metaphor also resonated with Rousseau’s vision of the authenticity of simpler musics. Yet associating China with Scotland created as many prob­ lems as it solved. For one thing, despite his personal admiration for Rous­ seau, Burney was not a hard-­line Rousseauiste —­he had too much respect for polyphonic music. For another thing, drawing comparisons between the rustic Highland Scots and the cultivated urban Chinese left Burney having to argue that China’s music was somehow not synchronized with its wider level of civilization. In the next section of the letter Lind addresses Burney’s concerns about Chinese scales. He has, unfortunately, nothing to add from Chinese sources, but he does supply the pitches available “on the two Chinese organs which are in my possession.” On both, he reports, he is able to produce two five-­ note sequences, one from D to A with a half step between E and F-­natural, and one an octave higher, from C1 to G1, with a half step between F-­sharp and G. Making things somewhat more complex, he then reports that he has transcribed the pitches of his organ “a sixth above Concert Pitch,” so that “the lowest note of their organ d . . . agrees with the lowest note of their Flute, which is a complet [sic] Fife.” By “complete” Lind seems to mean “the same as Western.” Although he never discussed Lind’s observa­ tions about the flute specifically, in his article for Rees’s Cyclopaedia thirty years later Burney was still trying to work out why the Chinese, if they had access to instruments that could produce semitones, appeared to use only “simple” pentatonic scales in their music. In the rest of the letter Lind addresses Burney’s wider questions about Chinese musical practices. “Music is a Profession in China,” he writes, “and is taught partly by certain Characters, and partly by the Ear.” This answer, which he backs up with extensive examples of Chinese musical materials in the appendix, brings together two issues that Burney found important. The first is the social and economic status of Chinese musicians, a matter he was to follow up sixteen years later during the Macartney Embassy.  The second is notation. In the 1770s, thanks in part to misleading statements in

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reports such as those from Du Halde, many European observers were un­ sure if the Chinese had any music notation at all.57 For Burney this would have been a crucial question. A consensus was building among European music historians that musical cultivation was tied to literacy. Burney clearly hoped information about notation would help him locate China more pre­ cisely on the spectrum of musical progress. Lind also provides Burney with a fingering chart for a flute with Chinese note names in the gongche sys­ tem—­a Chinese musical notation that uses characters to denote individual pitches, and some transcribed melodies. Lind ends with further information about the music he had experienced in Canton, relating that “Music is not only used in their Plays, but tunes are also play’d, at Marriages, Funerals, and in all Pro[c]essions. . . . I beg to observe to you that the Chinese always Sing in a feigned Voice.” Two further documents are enclosed with the letter: a book of Chinese melo­ dies in gongche notation and the text for a piece of sung narrative drama.58 Burney either misplaced these and forgot about them or—­perhaps finding them too challenging—­simply ignored them in his further work on Chi­ nese music. Three decades later, when he came to write his article on the subject in Rees’s Cyclopaedia, Burney appears to have forgotten Lind as well. The Scotsman’s name is nowhere to be found.

Matthew Raper: “I Played It in Their Band” While working on the “Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients” Bur­ ney extended his search for information on Chinese music to China itself. Three decades later, in his article on Chinese music for Rees’s Cyclopaedia, Burney wrote “when collecting materials for [my] General History of Music [I]  .  .  . sent queries to an English gentleman, a good judge of music, who had resided many years at Canton.”59 This was Matthew Raper Jr. (1742–­1826), a British trader in Canton from 1767 and chief of the East In­ dia Company Committee there from 1777 until 1781.60 Raper was a typical company functionary. More than one member of his family had added to the family’s fortune by working in the China trade. Their wealth enabled them to cultivate intellectual pursuits. Matthew Raper’s uncle, also called Matthew Raper, was a fellow of the Royal Society and an expert on antique coins.61 Matthew Raper Jr. followed in his uncle’s footsteps. Shortly af­ ter he returned to Britain in 1782 Raper, who had collected meteorological data in Canton during his time there, was also elected to the Royal Society (Charles Burney was among the fellows who proposed him).62 He later

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served as vice president of the Society of Antiquaries and was a director of the Bank of England.63 Raper was a musical man. At some point during the completion of the first volume of the General History (to which Raper was a subscriber), Bur­ ney wrote to him in Canton asking for further information about Chinese music. The questions, and Raper’s answers, are lost. In the first surviving document of this correspondence, a draft letter to Raper from the autumn of 1777 (more than a year after the publication of volume 1 of the General History), Burney refers to an earlier batch of materials from Raper that “you were so kind to send in me in Dec. 1775.”64 Since the materials Raper sent included writings he had in turn acquired elsewhere in China, it seems reasonable to assume that Burney had made his first approach about a year before. European shipping tended to arrive in Canton in the spring and summer. The journey from England took about six months at its swiftest. So Burney’s first query would have been in autumn of 1774, about the time he corresponded with Lind while working feverishly to complete the “Dis­ sertation on the Music of the Ancients.” In fact, in a letter to Lind on Sep­ tember 19, 1774, Burney reports that he has sent “some queries to intelli­ gent persons [in China] by two or three ships” but doubts that “an answer can be returned previous to the completion of my work.”65 Raper’s materials, also lost, would have reached London at the earliest in late summer 1776. Their contents can be deduced from Burney’s draft reply.66 They included two sets of answers to Burney’s questions about Chi­ nese music (which would have been similar, one presumes, to the ones he asked Lind about the same time). Raper had apparently sent them onward to Beijing.67 In the draft letter to Raper, Burney reports that his “chief dif­ ficulty in reading them is in reconciling the answer to my second Query—­ whether the Chinese have any Semitones?” Raper’s Italian correspondent had answered this, Burney reports, “in the negative: Gli Cinesi nella loro Musica non hanno Semituoni [the Chinese in their music do not have semi­ tones].” The Italian, however, also included a transcription of an air that accompanied the report. In it Burney found semitones. This left him to speculate that “perhaps in the ancient National Music of China, like that of Scotland, these intervals are avoided; but either by corruption, Refinement, or imitation, of other Music, the moderns not only use the Semitones in their New Melodies, but apply them, in varying and gracing the ancient.”68 Since both the written and the musical texts Burney refers to here are lost, it is not possible to further examine his claim, which would have placed

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Chinese music on the developmental trajectory Burney assumed for all cul­ tivated music. It is possible to speculate, however, that the transcription may have been “westernized” by adding appoggiaturas and other embellishments. This was common practice with non-­Western music, as shown by a “Chi­ nese air” that circulated in London and was provided with a figured bass and passing tones.69 Raper also enclosed a set of answers to Burney’s questions from a French missionary. This was most likely Jean-­Joseph de Grammont (1736–­1812), a Jesuit active at the Beijing court who “played the violin well.”70 Grammont, who was later involved in the reception of the Macartney Embassy to the Beijing court in 1793–­94, also provided Raper with a Latin translation of the Daodejing.71 Burney, looking for support for the idea that modern Chinese music might use a more extensive scale than ancient music had, cites only one passage from Grammont’s report, the statement that “ancient Chinese music has surely suffered many changes, which are very difficult to verify.”72 In addition to these two reports from Westerners, Raper apparently sent—­some time later—­a translation of a Chinese music treatise.73 Again, Burney returns to the question of semitones. “I find the Gamut Equivalents to so ut, & mi fa [the last is a semitone],” he writes. “And yet your cor­ respondent [he doesn’t specify which] says ‘the Chinese are astonished & unable to give a satisfactory answer when interrogated about semitones’—­ and allows that their Scale is not in tune with ours.”74 Again, without refer­ ence to the treatise itself one can only speculate about the Chinese “Gamut” (the English term for a hexachord or series of six notes moving stepwise through whole and half steps). Chinese music theorists, however, had long had a theory about how to divide an octave into twelve equal half steps.75 It seems that Burney was becoming aware of this as he gained access to more Chinese materials. He therefore wondered how it could be possible that a people who understood the concept of semitones—­and thus the filling out of the octave—­did not use this concept in practice. For the moment he fell back on his personal experience of the six-­note Chinese instrument he had played in Paris, and on the writings of Rameau and Roussier, to conclude “on Probability” that “the Chinese scale and music is without semitones.”76 Together with the written materials, Raper sent Burney a selection of Chinese musical instruments. According to the 1777 draft letter to Raper, “the Instruments received some damage from the length of the voyage and the Dampness of the place where they were stowed on Ship-­Board.” Burney hoped “to get then repaired and to find out the Scales of some of them.”77

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Thirty years later, in the Cyclopaedia article, Burney recalled that Raper’s consignment included a complete set of Chinese instruments; among them every species of flutes, several string instruments of the lute and guitar kind . . . [and] the ching [sheng] . . . a beautiful instrument, which has a gourd or bamboo for its basis, and represents in the arrangement of its reeds or bamboo pipes, the column of an organ; with these we received the largest gong which had ever been brought to England.78

The instruments, which must have taken up plenty of space, are not in­ cluded in any of the surviving inventories of Burney’s estate and are not mentioned in any of Fanny Burney’s accounts.79 There must have been at least one additional sheng in Britain at the time: in the 1777 draft letter to Raper Burney mentions that Queen Charlotte also had one.80 Raper documented Chinese music in a third medium. Twenty-­three pictures of Chinese instruments, many with inscriptions in Raper’s hand (mentioned in chapter 2), surfaced at an auction in London in 2012.81 They include depictions of percussion, wind, and string instruments. One, of an erhu, includes an annotation that suggests Raper did his own empirical re­­ search on Chinese music: “I have performed 4 of their tunes as well as many English airs on it. & I have play [sic] on it in one of their bands” (see fig. 2.8).82 Only one of the paintings—­which Raper labeled “a Mandarins Concert”—­shows Chinese music making. This one is a version of a more widely circulated depiction of an ensemble of northern Chinese origin. Raper’s annotation indicates that the scene is “more usual at Pekin in which a Servant Maid performs a principal part” (fig. 3.1).83 In a collection given to the British Library by one of John Barrow’s descendants there are two sheets of illustrations of Chinese instruments in Raper’s hand. The image of an erhu there, which is labeled Yee-­yine as in the painting, includes the caption “the instrument I learnt on.”84 The two are obviously the source of a two-­page spread of illustrations in John Barrow’s account of his travels to China as part of the Macartney Embassy. In Barrow’s book Raper’s per­ sonal caption is replaced with the phrase “two-­stringed violins.”85 It is impossible to say if Raper originally intended the paintings for Bur­ ney—­who does not mention them in his correspondence—­or even if  Rap­ er’s annotations date from his time in Canton or were added later, perhaps in preparing the illustrations for Barrow’s account. They do show, however, that one of Burney’s main correspondents in China did more than broker

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fig u re 3.1   “A Mandarins Concert.” Anonymous, Canton, ca. 1800. Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

contacts to missionaries in Beijing. Raper, it seems, made music with Chi­ nese partners, on Chinese instruments.

China in the General History of Music In a letter to his friend Charles Davy dated November 3, 1774, Burney re­ ported that he had already sent his “Dissertation on the Music of the An­ cients” to press.86 Lind’s materials, which arrived a few days later, thus came too late to be included in the General History until it was revised for a second edition in 1789. Burney did not find this section of the General History easy to write. Despite—­or perhaps because of—­his successful efforts to acquire source material, he found himself almost overwhelmed by the task of finding sensible answers to the questions raised by this part of his historical project. While at work on it he wrote to Thomas Twining, “After reading the thoughts and opinions of others, I have none of my own.”87 Lind’s collection of materials arrived in the midst of Burney’s struggle with a mountain of conflicting interpretations of ancient Greek music theory, and he was apparently in no mood to stop and consider what they meant. So the discussion of  China in the first edition depends entirely on Burney’s reading of  French authors, his experience with one Chinese instrument on

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his last evening in Paris, and his memory of what Dr. Lind had told him at the Earl of Sandwich’s dinner in July 1772. Perhaps that explains the somewhat defensive tone of his reply to Lind’s letter. Lind’s material, he writes, “corroborate[s] accounts . . . already received from intelligent Per­ sons in the Matters . . . some of whom like yourself have been in China.”88 He then turns to the comparison with Scots music. “With respect to the Scale,” he writes, his experiences of the instrument in Paris along with the melodies quoted in Du Halde, plus “12 more which I have just received and concerning the authenticity of which there is not the least room for doubt” are compelling evidence “of the strong resemblance between the Chinese melodies and those of Scotland.”89 The “Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients” was engraved in its final version by the end of 1774.90 But it took until late 1776 for the entire first volume of the General History to appear in print. Burney’s many dif­ ficulties notwithstanding, the book took its place alongside Adam Smith’s Wealth of  Nations, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the first volume of Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air as one of main nonfiction publications of the year in London.91 We recall that Burney’s aim in the “Dissertation” was to forestall the need to deliver a full-­blown narrative history of ancient music. His strategy was to start the entire project with an essay in which modes and scales bring order to the interpretative free-­for-­all about which so many had fixed opinions (and there were so few sources). In the “Dissertation” itself Burney arrives in China by way of a discussion of what he calls the Greek “old enharmonic modes,” melodic fragments that skipped some notes instead of proceeding in steps. He quotes from the discussion in Plutarch’s “Dialogue on Music” of the invention of the enharmonic genus and demonstrates using a musical example that takes the Dorian mode and “omits every third sound.”92 This, he observes, “is exactly the old Scots scale in the minor key: a circumstance that must strike everyone who reads” the passage in Plutarch’s account.93 He then turns eastward to Roussier’s derivation in his history of a Chinese scale that produced the same pitches. Next Burney cites the Chinese melody in Rousseau’s Dictionary as further evidence that Chinese music is pentatonic. Finally he returns to his encounter with Abbé Arnaud’s instrument in Paris, whose intervals were arranged in such a way as to form a scale from which “no music can be composed . . . that will not remind us of the melody of Scotland.”94 All of this demonstrates that Scots music “will hereafter be proved to be of a much higher antiquity than has generally been imagined.”95 Finally Burney deploys Lind. “Dr. Lind,” he writes, “an excellent judge of

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the subject . . . assured me that all the melodies he heard [in China] bore a strong resemblance to the old Scots tunes.”96 Lind’s qualification (“I cannot say whither all”) does not appear, probably because Burney had already sent the “Dissertation” to press when Lind’s letter arrived. Burney’s association of Scots music and Chinese music solved a histo­ riographical conundrum. It was arrived at in a hurry and shaped by multiple influences, yet is was to have enormous influence. Matthew Gelbart, who discusses this passage of the General History in detail in The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner, sees it as Burney’s contribution to an “overarching theory of folk modal­ ity.”97 Gelbart notes that the association of modes without semitones with primitive or ancient music was observed earlier by Benjamin Franklin and simultaneously by Burney’s rival Sir John Hawkins, who called such modes “ancient and raw.”98 Burney took this projection of music history onto a spatial axis and made relics of a lost sonic past “foreign.” Thus, Gelbart ar­­ gues, Burney “set an avalanche in motion” that resulted in the widespread acceptance, long into the twentieth century, of an analogy between “Scots,” “oriental,” and “ancient” music.99 Burney ends this section with a return to the Greek modes, whose “old enharmonic” version, Burney surmises from his reading of Plutarch, must have skipped notes, for “there is nothing that gives a stronger character . . . to a melody, than the constant or usual omission of particular notes in the scale.”100 This skipping of notes makes it likely that “the cast of the old na­ tional Greek airs was much like that of the old Scots music.” He then con­ cludes his discussion of the “old enharmonic” genus with a return to China. “The Chinese scale,” he writes, “take it which way we will, is certainly Scot­ tish.”101 Burney is not prepared to go as far as Roussier in presuming that means the two share common origins. His point is that both Chinese and Scots melodies are more “natural” in the sense that they lack artifice. This is in turn a sign of antiquity. Because the Chinese are “extremely tenacious of old customs, and equally the enemies of innovation to the ancient Egyp­ tians,” organizing music in scales that skip steps must be a trait common to peoples “during the infancy of civilisation and the arts among them.”102 Burney did not moderate his claims about Sino-­Scots musical affinities when he revised the General History for its second edition in 1789.103 On the contrary, he drew on the additional materials he had collected in the meantime, including those from Raper. Burney’s speculations about Scots and Chinese music were a starting point for a progressive conjectural history of music. In the second volume

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of the General History, first published in 1782, Burney takes his story up to the Late Middle Ages. By about 1400 CE, Burney writes, music history in Europe had reached a turning point. Europeans had discovered the “prin­ cipal materials for musical composition,” including “regular and extensive scale for Melody, a code of general laws for Harmony, with a commodious Notation and Time-­table,” which “seem to furnish the Musician with the whole mechanism of his art.”104 But the music fourteenth-­century compos­ ers produced does not “fulfil our present ideas of excellence.” That is to say, having “progressive” materials at hand does not guarantee a result agreeable to modern ears. But such materials make possible a new division of music into “high” and “low” categories. Elsewhere in the General History Burney explains that a complete set of tools allows composers and performers to leave behind the “kind of artless music which is best learned in the nursery and the street” and make “real Music, arising from a complete scale under the guidance of such rules of art as successful cultivation has rendered respectable and worthy of imitation.” In the Late Middle Ages European music was perched be­ tween “national” or “artless” music (in the sense of music without artifice) and “real music arising from a complete scale.”105 Burney, however, attributes the deficiencies of historical musics not to “want of knowledge [or] genius in their authors but to the Gothic rambles in which music was still bound.”106 The word Gothic, which also appears in Rousseau’s version of musical prog­­ ress, is significant. Goths have all the tools but are missing cultivation. Here China returns. “Music being the object of a sense common to all mankind,” he asks, “if genius alone could invent and bring it to perfection, why is China, which has been so long civilized, still without great com­ posers and performers?”107 In Burney’s view the Chinese are anything but “Gothic,” so why do they not make music commensurate with their state of cultivation? “It cannot be supposed that nature is entirely to blame,” Bur­­ ney answers, “and that there is a physical defect in the intellects or organi­ zation of all the sons of men, except in Europe; and that a perfect ear, and the power of delighting it, are local.” Burney, unlike his younger contem­ porary Johann Gottfried Herder, did not believe that non-­European races were destined by their anatomies—­features that would later be referred to as “racial characteristics”—­to suffer from inferior musical taste. He argues instead that different national groups were “cultivated” to varying degrees owing to lack of experience with better music. “As the eye accommodates itself to all the gradations of light and obscurity,” he explains, “so does the ear to such gratifications as are within its reach; and the people accustomed

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to bad music enjoy it contentedly, without languishing for better.” Europe­ ans of the fourteenth century, and contemporary Chinese, did not suffer for being deprived of modern music: “The best music of every age and nation is delightful to hearers, whose ideas of excellence are bounded by what they daily hear.”108 If only the Chinese were to have a “complete scale,” their music would automatically be much better. Burney comes back to China a final time in the preface to the third volume of the General History (published with the fourth as the final in­ stallment in 1789). He gave this short text the title “Essay on Criticism.” At stake are three questions: Who might best form judgments on music? How might they be arrived at? and What might the attributes of superior music be? The answer to the first is a defense of the musical expert; the sec­ ond, a description of a process involving repeated hearing, discussion, and debate.109 In the final paragraph of the “Essay,” Burney frames the answer to the third question—­the attributes of superior music—­with the idea of Chinese simplicity. “There is a degree of refinement, delicacy, and inven­ tion,” he writes, “which lovers of simple and common Music can no more comprehend than the Asiatics harmony.” He continues in a footnote: “The Chinese, allowed to be the most ancient and longest civilised people exist­ ing, are displeased with harmony, or Music in parts; it is too confused and complicated for ears accustomed, after repeated trials, to simplicity.”  This is the same argument he had made in the second volume: the ear warms only to what it knows. Good music, he continues in the main text, “is only un­ derstood and felt” by listeners who “can quit the plains of simplicity [and] penetrate the mazes of art and contrivance.” Unconsciously echoing his own musical travels, he describes the good listener as one who can “climb mountains, dive into dells, or cross the seas in search of extraneous and exotic beauties with which the monotonous melody of popular Music has not yet been embellished.”110 Burney is not really making a comparison between European and non-­ European music. Although he does consider most non-­European music “simple,” the music he favors is something one must search for “across” the metaphoric seas. He instead pleads for the newer music of “the German composers of the present age,” presumably including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Joseph Haydn, whom he knew personally and much admired, whose “seemingly forced and affected modulation . . . is only too much for us, because we have heard too little.”  Those of the public who reject such music are much like the Chinese: “What judgment and good taste admire at first hearing, makes no impression on the public in general, but by dint

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of repetition and habitude.” Indeed, listening to good music can improve the public intellectually, since “a syllogism that is very plain to a logician, is incomprehensible to a mind unexercised in associating and combining abstract ideas.” Acquiring a taste for good music is itself an exercise. “Novelty has been acquired,” Burney writes, “and attention excited, more by learned modula­ tion in Germany, than by new and difficult melody in Italy.” Those who like neither one do so “because [they] are not gradually arrived at them.” The exercise grows easier with age: “The most easy, simple, and natural is new to youth and inexperience, and we grow nice and fastidious by fre­ quently hearing compositions of the first class, exquisitely performed.”111 With these words Burney drew the first two decades of his China project to a close. There he might have left things had not world politics intervened.

fou r

Sound and the Macartney Mission, 1792–­1794

T

A Grand Tour of Listeners

he diplomatic mission lord george macartney led to China in 1792–­94 was a watershed in Sino-­Western relations. Jürgen Osterhammel has called it “one of the most theatrical episodes in the history of  Western diplomacy” and commented that “seldom has so little been achieved with so much effort.”1 Its story is often boiled down to one scene at the Qianlong emperor’s summer palace in Jehol (today’s Chengde), beyond the Great Wall north of Beijing. The occasion was the first presentation of the ambassador to the emperor. Here, to the sounds of what a member of Macartney’s staff called “the most beautiful music that we had heard [in China],” Macartney, in full British court dress, approached the imperial throne and dropped to one knee, in defiance of Chinese protocol that expected the full kowtow or ninefold prostration, including repeatedly banging the head on the floor.2 This defiance, as James Hevia has argued, became central to stories Britons told the world and each other about their proud refusal to submit to the ceremonies of antimodern foreign despots.3 Macartney had left his quarters before dawn that morning in the company of his own five musicians, drawn from the prestigious Duke of  York’s band, dressed to impress in (ill-­fitting) green-­and-­gold formal uniforms apparently bought secondhand from the French embassy in London.4  They intended to add their own sounds to Lord Macartney’s message. On the way to Beijing they performed frequently, outdoors or for guests in the residence the authorities made available to Macartney. In addition they contributed sonic solemnity at the burials of comrades who succumbed to disease. They drew on a repertoire put together expressly for them by Macartney’s acquaintance Charles Burney, who intended to showcase the best London had to offer in the field of music, just as the embassy as a whole

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was meant to display the most advanced and useful British manufacturing technologies.5 At the same time they aimed to project British national sovereignty as grandly as possible. Newer scholarship on the embassy stresses the instability of this message.6  The embassy’s instructions from William Pitt the Younger’s minister Henry Dundas stressed China’s high culture and stipulated that the mission should enable “free communication with a people . . . among whom civilisation has existed and the arts have been cultivated though a long series of ages with fewer interruptions than elsewhere.”7 But its agenda was largely economic. Dundas, for instance, especially wanted the Chinese to relax controls on the “country trade” between India and China, which significantly increased the circulation of profits made in China (and from the growing illicit traffic in opium) back to London.8 In the end the embassy was neither a practical nor a political success. The Chinese rejected many of the British gifts and dismissed requests for closer diplomatic and economic ties. In its personnel and aims, the embassy was also a “Grand Tour of discovery” in the spirit of the voyages of Captain James Cook.9 These were fresh in the mind of any Briton with interests in foreign places, not only Burney, whose son James had been a junior officer on Cook’s second and third voyages.10 The “Grand Tour,” whether its destination was the ruins of classical antiquity or the newly discovered islands of the South Seas, was a journey across time as much as across space. In many ways the Macartney Embassy was both. P. J. Marshall argues that it gave the British, whose experience of China had been limited mostly to Canton, an opportunity to “observe the [Chinese] imperial system at its centre.”11 Like Cook’s crew of botanists and natural philosophers, Macartney and his entourage sought knowledge in a scientific sense. Indeed, by the late eighteenth century, travelers (and the public who so avidly purchased their published reports) were expected to take a more “scientific” approach.12 Some of the work Macartney and his fellow travelers did exemplifies a transition from a more impressionistic method to the kind of empirical observation we might today call “social science.”13 This chapter imagines the embassy as a Grand Tour of listeners. The embassy made music in China, and its members listened to Chinese music. As listeners in a faraway place, many of them attempted to meet the expectations of such new regimes of knowledge and hear “scientifically.”14 In what follows I engage with the substantial literature the embassy generated, with an ear to what its members heard in China. Like Cook’s company, the embassy included a full complement of scientific specialists, including painters, draftsmen, and at least one member,  John Barrow, with

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an interest in botany. Their interests—­reflected in dozens of paintings and sketches made on the journey, diaries they kept while in China, and the vast literature they generated when they returned to Britain—­were primarily visual.15 I revisit these diverse materials with open ears, noting especially the moments when British observers drop out of their customarily visual descriptive mode into Chinese sound worlds. The embassy had elements of the actual aristocratic Grand Tour. Its com­­ pany included eleven-­year-­old George Thomas Staunton (hereafter Thomas), the son of Macartney’s deputy Sir George Staunton. On the voyage from Britain to China Thomas learned Chinese from the embassy’s Chinese inter­ preters.16 The rest of his education came from his personal tutor, the Ger­­ man émigré John ( Johann) Christian Hüttner, a university-­trained man of literature with musical interests.17 Macartney, acting for his friend Burney, seems to have charged Hüttner with collecting more information about Chi­­ nese music. Hüttner’s memoir of the embassy includes frequent observations about what he heard, particularly music. His later correspondence with Burney added significant details to the older man’s account of Chinese music in Rees’s Cyclopaedia.18 The wide range of perspectives in the literature the em­­bassy generated is often missed in standard accounts, which focus on Staun­­ton’s “official” report and Macartney’s journals. This literature overlooks materials generated by participants of more modest origins, including the ghostwritten travelogues by Macartney’s manservant Aeneas Anderson and a book by Samuel Holmes, a noncommissioned officer in the guard detachment. Historian Linda Colley is an exception: she has observed that the mission’s diverse regional and class backgrounds made it a microcosm of a new, more egalitarian, British identity.19 But she misses the German émigré Hüttner, whose aural witness will be crucial to my argument. This chapter follows the embassy’s journey in sound across China from its landing near Tainjin in late August 1793 to its departure from Beijing in late September (see fig. 4.1). Soon afterward, the embassy was divided. Many of its personnel remained on the ships that had brought the party from England, now anchored at Chusan, and traveled in them to Canton; the rest, including Macartney and his immediate staff, traveled by river and overland to the trading city in the south. That portion of the journey, which was similar to the first phase of travels upriver to Beijing, will be discussed briefly in the epilogue. This chapter engages with specific soundscapes of the embassy’s journey in the north of China and its Manchu borderlands: of the river, the road, the city, and the court. Macartney and his men (there were no women), accompanied at times by hundreds or even thousands of

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f i gure 4 .1   Map of the Macartney Embassy’s route.

Chinese attendants, guards, and bearers, made their way first from the coast by river and then on horseback to Beijing, where they deposited their cargo of gifts. A smaller delegation then continued on horseback over the Great Wall to Qianlong’s summer palace in Jehol before returning to the capital.

On Rivers and Canals Macartney, his men, and their gifts finally left the ships that had brought them from England on July 25, 1793. Their nine-­month journey had taken them across the British maritime world, first from Portsmouth to Madeira, then across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, before they turned east toward St. Helena. Following well-­traveled byways of the China trade, they next crossed the Indian Ocean from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Malacca, where they continued north toward Cochin China (today’s Vietnam). From there it was a short journey of several weeks to the northern coast of China, to the mouth of the Peyho (today Hai) River. At that point the large ships on which the embassy had traveled from England, the Royal Navy man-­of-­war HMS Lion and the Indiaman Hindustan, could travel no farther owing to shallow waters. Macartney, his entourage, and their cargo were transferred to barges for the onward journey toward Beijing. To the astonishment of European onlookers, Chinese laborers unloaded the gifts in less than three days, transferring them to a flotilla of small craft dragged upriver by colleagues on the riverbank.20 The signal for the flotilla’s departure, Macartney reports in his diary, “was a most deafening noise” of “gongs or copper drums.”21

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From the beginning, the embassy’s literate members treated their journey as a source of novelty. Staunton reports that once they left their ships they “could not but be gratified in finding in almost every object that presented itself to them, something from its novelty striking to the eye, or otherwise interesting to the mind.”22 From the start, members of the embassy opened their ears too. Aeneas Anderson, Macartney’s valet, recalled how detachments of Chinese troops fired salutes from “three small swivels about thirty inches in length, which are fixed in the ground with the muzzles pointing to the air: these are discharged as the person to be honoured with the salute passes.” In addition, he writes, the delegation was awakened at 4:00 a.m. by the sound of a gong that resembled “to some degree, the cover of a large stewpan, and is used as bells or trumpets are in Europe, to convey notice.”23 The gongs were so loud that they could “be distinctly heard at the distance of a league.” Hüttner begins his narrative of the progress upriver by describing everyday sounds on board his ship. Some were interesting, such as the sharp crack of fireworks lit in religious ceremonies meant to ensure safe passage in bad weather or lulls in wind. Others, such as the gong, were unpleasant: “The pleasure,” he reports, “of our comfortable journey on the water, was often interrupted by the noise of a large metal cymbal, which was struck with a wooden mallet in order to signal to the labourers on the riverbank to slow down or speed up.”  This “deafening noise,” he continues, “robbed us of our sleep on some nights,” inspiring “unkind thoughts that were as fruitless as polite requests [to stop].”24 Staunton relates how the embassy’s painter, William Hickey (a flutist), discovered that their hosts had set up “a tent, containing a band of musicians, to play whenever the Ambas­ sador, or principal persons of the Embassy, passed by them” at the location on shore where the embassy’s goods were transferred.25 Hüttner disliked such Chinese military music intensely. (“It is most desolate, without rhythm, without melody and without the slightest expression.”)26 Some years later Hüttner recalled the soundscapes of the rivers and canals in the widely read German magazine Journal der Moden. At the center of the text is a transcription of the “Peyho Song” apparently sung by the embassy’s boatmen (example 4.1).27 In the article he suggests that the transcription take its place beside other luxury items of Chinese origin in the comfortable homes of their readers, including presumably the extravagant German edition of Staunton’s account of the embassy, which Hüttner co­ wrote and translated. “We believe,” the article opens, that the song “will offer our readers pleasant diversions at their tea tables, in the vicinity of which a good harpsichord, clavichord, or fortepiano is usually to be found, if they

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exam pl e 4 .1   “Chinesischer Ruderlied,” from “Ein Ruderliedchen aus China mit Melodie,” Journal der Moden, January 1796, 78.

would like to try to [drink their tea] to the music of the country from which their teacups are filled, and by which the tea itself is carried on Chinese boats and junks, and delivered to the English factories in Canton.”28 Hütt­ ner then proposes that the boatmen’s song might offer historical insights owing to “certain similarities”  between Chinese music and Greek music.  The

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oarsmen of ancient Greece—­for instance, in the plays of Aristophanes—­ also sang to keep time. “But we will gladly leave this to learned classicists,” the article continues, perhaps not wanting to try its readers’ patience further. Next come quotations from a letter by Hüttner offering an earwitness report. “The captain begins,” he writes, “and his people answer.” This, he explains, prevents boredom, keeps the boatmen concentrated, “and assists in the regularity of the rowing.” Hüttner continues: “I remember, with a lively sense of pleasure, [how] one evening . . . we met a hundred bigger and smaller boats, each of which passed by us on heading downriver out of the harbour. The bustle on the boats, the rhythmic movement of the countless oars and the echo of these in a song taken up from many hundreds of voices on different sides! How alive was it all! What a confusion! London, Liverpool, and other harbours seem to me to be nothing by comparison!”29 With references to ancient Greece and the favorable comparisons to London and Liverpool, Hüttner draws contemporary China into intellectual and sonic worlds more familiar to his readers. He then introduces a transcription of the song. The harmonization is by Karl Kambra, a German expatriate composer in London. Its pretty thirds and predictable harmonies emphatically domesticate (in more than one sense of the term) both the exotic sound world of China and the hard physical labor of the boatmen. The boatmen’s song had a long life as a piece of popular musical exoticism; it circulated long into the nineteenth century and became a well-­known example of musical “yellowface.”30 The publication of the “Peyho Song” attaches music to the consumption of luxury products made available by that labor. The song makes this labor audible and real: the global processes of commerce that had bound Europe and China together for more than a century take sonic form in the bourgeois salon. In this space, singing a work song at the keyboard, the Journal ’s readers experienced China in counterpoint between the elegant embellishment of their social environment and the material presence of global markets and the labor that sustained them. In addition, the implication that Hüttner’s listening was “scientific” (in line with his claim that Macartney’s entourage was dominated by experts) makes his transcription more than just an attempt to cash in on chinoiserie’s enduring popularity. There is counterpoint here between the effusive tone of enthusiasm for China and the sober reporting of an enlightened listener. John Barrow, the embassy’s comptroller, heard the “Peyho Song” from the “expert” perspective. Far less enthusiastic about China than his traveling companion Hüttner, he did not think highly of the boatmen’s song as

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example 4 .2   “Air,” in John Barrow, Travels in China, 81.

music. In his widely read 1804 memoir Travels in China he makes no effort to find an aesthetic frame for it. Instead he supplies a transcription of its call and response (example 4.2). Barrow neither connects the song to the global circulation of goods nor attempts to present it as evidence of China’s cultivation. Instead, he uses it to work out a more precise distinction between the labor of the Chinese and that of more “savage” peoples. He argues that although “extraordinary exertions of bodily strength, depending, to a certain degree, on the willingness of the mind, are frequently accompanied with exhilarating exclamations among the most savage people,” this song “should not be considered from this point of view.” Instead, like “the exclamations of our seamen in hauling the ropes” or “the oar song of the Hebridians” that in turn resemble the chants of ancient Greek galley slaves, “the chief object of the Chinese chorus seemed to be that of combining cheerfulness with regularity.”31 For Barrow the Chinese are neither savages who sing while they work nor ele­ gant “enchanting mandarins.” They are merely cheerful workers. They are a resource like any other in China: ripe, perhaps, for Western exploitation.

Sounds of the Land  Journey On Tuesday August 6 the embassy’s flotilla arrived at Tongzhou, the northern terminus of the Grand Canal. There the passengers disembarked and made their way toward Beijing. On land, as William Alexander (one of the embassy’s artists) reported in his journal, the embassy’s military detachment paraded to the fife and drum at roll call in the mornings and evenings. When

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the day’s travel was done the travelers’ experience was “enlivened by music from his Lordship’s band.” European music mixed with Chinese scenery—­ and reminded Alexander of home. Remarking on “the great number and variety of coloured lanterns, [and] Chinese visitors,” he concludes that “it reminds one of a masquerade at Vauxhall.”32 There was picturesque cross-­ cultural music making too. The Scots physicist James Dinwiddie, assigned to the embassy to tend the scientific instruments meant to be given to the emperor, reports that early in the land journey Chinese officials attached to the embassy once invited some of its gentlemen to tea. One Chinese official “both danced and sang, imitating with his voice a few tunes played upon the flute by Mr. Hickie [Hickey], and which he also accompanied by striking some tea-­cups and basins on the table with his fan.”33 On Monday August 19 Macartney arranged for a display of the embassy’s artillery pieces.34 His primary audience was the “Tartar Legate” Cheng-­ Jui, a high Manchu official who had been sent from the court in Beijing to accompany the embassy on the last leg of the journey. According to Macartney his men were able to fire the small brass field pieces “from twenty to thirty times a minute.”  The legate and his colleagues, Macartney reports hopefully, must have been “at bottom not a little mortified by this small specimen of our art and superiority.” Thus Macartney and his men demon­ strated their imagined position relative to their hosts in military sounds, echoing the practice of cannon salutes that dominated Sino-­Western ceremonial encounters in Canton, thousands of kilometers to the south. The sounds of artillery both honored their hosts and threatened them. The rest of the day was taken up with continuing discussions about the ceremony Macartney and his men were to follow when they were presented to the emperor. In the historiography of the embassy the question of whether Macartney was to perform the full ninefold prostration has taken center stage.35 But in his journal entry for the day Macartney seems relaxed about what was apparently becoming a serious impasse. He reports that both he and his interpreter (a Chinese convert to Christianity who had studied in Naples) refused the entreaties of the legate and his men to practice the kowtow. Macartney wondered at his hosts’ reaction: instead of insisting on the point, they changed the subject, “saying and unsaying without hesitation what seems to answer to the demands of the moment.” Unaware, perhaps, of the gravity of  his refusal to follow the normal patterns of court ceremony, Macartney then entertained the legate and his staff with a concert by his band, “which they appeared much pleased with.”36 Macartney apparently was not going to let the day of his first encounter with high

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officials on Chinese soil end without a demonstration of British musical ac­­ complishment to match the military prowess demonstrated that morning by the noisy firing of artillery pieces. That evening Henry Eades, one of the embassy’s mechanics, died of dysentery. It was the first of many British deaths on the journey. Macartney’s staff made arrangements to bury him immediately. Anderson reports that the next morning a procession formed that consisted of the artillery detachment, the coffin, “two fifes playing a fu­­ neral dirge,” and the “mechanics, servants etc., two by two,” followed at the rear by the rest of the military detachment.37 Both Macartney and Anderson report that crowds of locals gathered to watch the ceremony and, in Macartney’s words, “seemed to be a good deal affected by its order and solemnity.”38 The next day the Macartney Embassy arrived at the outskirts of Beijing. Chinese officials had not intended that the ambassador and his entourage spend any time there on their way to the Qianlong emperor’s summer residence at Jehol. Instead, the embassy was led through the city of Beijing from north to south on its way to the palace complexes at Yuanmingyuan to the northwest (in today’s Haidan district). In transit the city’s soundscape was overwhelming. Barrow describes how, as the embassy traversed the city on a main avenue, its procession was repeatedly crossed by “different trains that were accompanying, with lamentable cries, corpses to their graves, and with squalling music, brides to their husbands . . . leaving little room for the cavalcade of the embassy to pass. All was in motion.”39 The streets were crowded with an “immense concourse of people” buying and selling various goods and services. “The buz [sic] and confused noises of this mixed multitude,” he continues, “proceeding from the loud bawling of those who were crying their wares, the wrangling of others, with every now and then a strange twanging noise like the jarring of a cracked Jew’s harp, the barber’s signal made by his tweezers, the mirth and laughter that prevailed in every group, could scarcely be exceeded by the brokers in the Bank rotunda, or by the Jews and old women in Rosemary-­Lane.”40 Barrow’s comparison to exotic street scenes in London—­reminiscent of William Hogarth’s famous depictions of their noisiness—­echoes contemporary Western accounts of Canton.41 His censorious tone reveals a desire to discipline especially those types of sounds that he associates with poverty or the “otherness” of  Jews, women, and financiers. In addition, Barrow wonders why Macartney’s considerable retinue attracted so little attention from the Chinese crowds: “Every one pursued his business, at the same time that he gratified his curiosity.” Indeed, he surmises, “it appeared that, on every

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day throughout the whole year, there was the same noise and bustle and crowd in the capital of China.”42 Anderson reports a similar impression. He describes the sound of the barber’s noisemaker in detail: “to distinguish their profession,” he writes, they “carry a pair of  large steel tweezers, which they open with their fingers, and let them close again with some degree of violence, which produces a shrill sound that is heard at a considerable distance.”43 Anderson also was struck by “the loud and bawling manner” of a man auctioning goods on the street.44 Later, approaching the northeastern end of the city, the embassy encountered a funeral procession in which the coffin was placed on a platform carried by “fifty or sixty men” marching “eight abreast with slow and solemn step.” They were followed, he reports, by a band “playing a kind of dirge, which was not without a mixture of pleasing tones.”45 Like everything else in China, the funerals, and probably the sounds that went with them, were perceived as bigger. Eventually the embassy arrived at imperial palaces at Yuanmingyuan to the west of the city. There they unloaded their considerable cargo of gifts and awaited permission from their hosts to set off for Qianlong’s summer palace on the other side of the Great Wall. The British delegation were not satisfied with their quarters at Yuanmingyuan. They found them poorly constructed and thus unsuitable for a long stay in winter.46 By the end of the week preparations were being made to move the embassy to a palace in the city. In the meantime, Macartney took the opportunity to visit the celebrated gardens at Yuanmingyuan, whose beauties, he wrote in his diary, “so strongly impressed my mind that I feel incapable of describing them.”47 In the “presence chamber” of the emperor in one of the garden’s many palaces (some in the European style), however, he found himself face to face with a particularly British musical past. “At one end [of the hall],” he writes, “I observed a musical clock that played twelve old English tunes, the ‘Black Joke,’ ‘Lillibullero,’ and other airs of the ‘Beggar’s Opera.’  ” He does not report what he thought of the music. He found the clocks themselves, though, to be “in a wretched old taste, with ornaments of crystal and coloured stones [that] had been, I dare say, very much admired in its time.”48 Some weeks later the Scot James Dinwiddie, assigned to set up the embassy’s complex mechanical gifts in the Great Hall at Yuanmingyuan, found to his surprise “a musical clock which played ‘Catherine Ogie,’ and a number of other tunes.”49 Chinese and Europeans alike often referred to such clocks—­using a term that emerged from Cantonese pidgin—­as “sing-­songs.” They were popular in China, especially at the

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imperial court in Beijing, throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, they were one of the few goods of British or European manufacture that consistently found favor with Chinese customers, making substantial profits for specialist manufacturers in London.50 Chinese officials valued them for their opulent design and clever construction. But they were also—­as Macartney’s apparent surprise at hearing such old music indicates—­vessels for the global circulation of music, and its preservation over long periods, a century before the age of mass mechanical reproduction.

Macartney’s Band in Beijing On Monday August 26, after some days of negotiation over the unsatisfac­ tory quarters in Yuanmingyuan, the court authorities authorized the removal of most of the embassy personnel to quarters in Beijing proper. The only members of the delegation to remain at Yuanmingyuan were the specialists brought along to construct the gifts that had been disassembled in transport. In Beijing Macartney and the embassy moved into a palatial building with no fewer than eleven courtyards.51 Anderson heard that it had once belonged to the hoppo, the chief inspector of maritime customs at Canton, who had since fallen into disgrace, and that its price would have been an astronomical 97,000 pounds sterling. It had its own theater, which Anderson describes as a square room with “a painted gallery, which runs en­­ tirely around it, for the spectators.” In the middle was a stage “raised from the floor about three feet” surrounded by a “passage of eight feet wide all round it.” The building, he concludes, “was very lofty.”52 This ideal acoustical space was to be the home of Macartney’s band during their stay in Beijing. Macartney and his staff used their sojourn in the hoppo’s palace to prepare for their impending journey to the emperor at Jehol, selecting the gifts they would bring with them and continuing negotiations about the form their introduction to Qianlong would take. Macartney, anticipating a longer stay, also began to decorate the palace as if it were a permanent embassy building. In fact his instructions from Pitt and Dundas had been to get the Chinese to agree to the establishment of a permanent mission and then take up residence in the Chinese capital city himself for a longer period.53 In the courtyard in front of his own apartments Macartney ordered that the embassy’s small collection of artillery pieces be displayed. By Thursday August 29 he had set up one of the rooms in the palace as a “presence chamber” complete with a canopy featuring the British royal coat of arms, elab­ orate thronelike chairs brought from London, and full-­length portraits by

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Sir Joshua Reynolds of King George III and Queen Charlotte.54 Here he received visitors, including court officials and European missionaries. Court officials who had not traveled with the emperor to Jehol were forbidden to visit the British mission. Hüttner suggests that most of the visitors who did call on Macartney at the palace had private connections to the Chinese whose job it was to look after the embassy.55 But that the palace was off-­ limits to the emperor’s staff might only have increased the temptation for other curious residents of Beijing to try to gain informal entrance. On the same day Macartney received “a very kind letter” from Jean-­Joseph-­Marie Amiot, the senior Jesuit in Beijing (and the author of a substantial work on Chinese music), who was then over eighty years old and too frail to call.56 Amiot’s fellow Jesuit Joseph de Grammont was another visitor. Grammont had already supplied information on Chinese music to Charles Burney via the East India trader Matthew Raper Jr.57 Earlier in 1793, Grammont—­ having heard a rumor that Macartney was already in Tianjin—­had written to the ambassador with advice about the political situation at Qianlong’s court and suggesting how best to present himself when the embassy arrived at the capital. In the letter Grammont offered to assist in preparing “the interior of the palace which has been assigned to you.” He also asked that Macartney send him a list of the names of the “gentlemen who make up your distinguished suite.” His letter continues, “The more numerous [the delegation] is, the more it will flatter the Emperor, and if it be accompanied by a band of music, his joy will be more real and complete.”58 Hüttner took time in Beijing to discuss Chinese music with Grammont, who told him that the Chinese “took pleasure in our slow vocal music” and were “delighted with the silvery sound of our harpsichords, pianofortes, and flutes, but that every third or fifth, as pleasant as they may be to our ears, is a dissonance to them. They only love octaves.”59 When the embassy had settled into the palace, its ensemble began daily concerts. Joyce Lindorff, in a recent study of the Macartney mission’s mu­ sical aspects, concludes that it is impossible to determine what the ambas­ sador’s band actually played. Two of the musicians, Lindorff reports, were proficient both on string instruments and bass wind instruments. The other three would logically have doubled treble and alto parts, allowing for the performance of a potentially enormous repertoire of arrangements from instru­ mental and vocal genres then available for four or five players.60 Given that the band had been selected by Macartney’s friend Burney, one of  Britain’s most knowledgeable and best-­networked musicians, and that its members gave concerts at Macartney’s residence every day, this repertoire was likely

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both sizable and varied. It seems likely that the band performed pieces—­ chosen by Burney—­by such composers as Mozart, Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, and above all Haydn, all of whom Burney regarded as leading European composers.61 Why exactly did Macartney bring a band all the way to Beijing? Since he was to appear in China as a high official of the British government, newly invested with a senior peerage, he probably wished for, and his paymasters in the East India Company supported, a degree of musical representation to underscore his importance. Grammont’s comments confirm this. But the band’s representational function might not have been the most important one. Following his friend Burney’s advice, Macartney might well have considered the ensemble, its instruments, and its repertoire to be yet another example of British “progress” in all fields, just like elaborate musical clocks. They also were a forum for displaying particularly British practices of elite amateur musicking, including occasional participation in the concerts by senior members of Macartney’s staff, much to the confusion of the Chinese, who were unaccustomed to seeing men of high rank participating in public entertainments of this kind.62 Ironically, this may have ended up undermining Macartney’s representational ambitions, since at least some Chinese officials thought such mixed music making cast their British counterparts in an unflattering light.63 But there is more to the inclusion of musical elements in Macartney’s delegation than just the display of Western music. Indeed, that the band’s specific repertoire was not thought worth recording suggests that the display of superior Western “music” (that is to say, “musical works”) was not the only or indeed the primary ambition of the musical components of the Macartney mission. Instead, the aim was include musical advancement in the catalog of attractive products of British manufacture that the embassy brought to China. Musical skill and musical instruments functioned on a continuum with the stainless steel cutlery, cleverly designed hunting rifles, model ships, and other products of  British manufacturing. In addition, musical instruments and practices could bridge the gap between such “low” items as forks and the luxurious representation that another category of the mission’s baggage stood for, including the enormous gilded carriage and the magnificent orrery, or “world machine.”64 The orrery, in fact, was the same Weltmachine that Charles Burney, Macartney’s musical adviser, had seen in Ludwigsburg in 1773, where it had been built by the clockmaker and “priest mechanic” Philipp Matthäus Hahn. The East India Company bought and refurbished it in 1792 for presentation as one of the embassy’s primary gifts to Qianlong. As Emily Dolan has observed, Burney—­who

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was also an amateur astronomer—­was “enraptured” by Hahn’s machine. He would surely have been aware that it was being sent to China, and he may have suggested it in the first place. Dolan argues that for Burney a musical performance was akin to a scientific demonstration.65 The embassy’s musical efforts would have been for him all of a piece with its elaborate cargo of scientific instruments. The band—­able to perform the most complex current European music—­was a kind of musical “world machine.” Despite Hüttner’s report that court officials were not permitted to call on the ambassador, Macartney relates that his daily visitors, besides missionaries, included “mandarins of the higher ranks.”66 Macartney wrote in his diary that “not a few” of them were attracted to the palace by the band, which “performed a very good concert in one of my apartments every evening.” One of the visitors was the “chief mandarin” of the emperor’s orchestra, who apparently came more than once “and listened to the performance with all the airs of a virtuoso.” This musical guest asked to be permitted to make drawings of the instruments, declining Macartney’s offer of the instru­ ments themselves as gifts. As Macartney relates, He  .  .  . sent for a couple of painters, who spread the floor with a few sheets of large paper, placed the clarinets, flutes, bassoons and French horns upon them, and then traced with their pencils the figures of the instruments, measuring all the apertures and noting the minutest partic­ ulars, and when this operation was completed they wrote down their re­­ marks, and delivered them to their master. I was told that his intention is to have similar instruments made here by Chinese workmen.67

Macartney used the band’s actual placement in the palace theater to subtly direct his visitors’ attention to the life-­size portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte in a nearby “grand saloon” (the “presence chamber”) through which, as Macartney writes in his journal, “we usually passed [on the way] to the concert room.” Indeed, the attraction of the paintings—­and the potential audience for the music—­soon was “so very great” that the ambassador was forced to ask Wang, one of the Chinese officials assigned to the embassy, “to regulate the number and quality of visitors and the hour of admittance.”68 Taken together, Reynolds’s portraits and Burney’s musical selections contributed both sonic and visual dimensions to the projection of what today would be called “soft power.” Hüttner provides the only direct account of Chinese reactions to Macartney’s band. In his memoir he admits that he “never expressly inquired

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[of the Chinese]” what they thought of it. He did hear, however, that “mandarins,” when asked, replied that it was “Chau” (hau), that is, “good.” But perhaps this answer, he reports, was made only out of “the courtesy that is so unique to them.” Indeed the embassy’s translator told him the Chinese did not like Western music. During performances by the band Hüttner “observed the facial expressions of noble and common Chinese” without ever “noticing the signs of unmistakable approval.” On the other hand, he surmises, the band’s “remarkable, meaningful, and—­acquired through long practice—­learned performances on our musical instruments must have aroused interest” on the part of the embassy’s Chinese listeners.69 The historical record has yet to yield evidence of what these listeners thought.

“King Solomon in All His Glory”: Listening to Power in Imperial Jehol On Monday, September 2, 1793, the embassy began the journey to Jehol for presentation to the emperor at his summer residence north of the Great Wall. Some of its members—­including Barrow and the artist William Alexander—­remained in Beijing and Yuanmingyuan, charged with preparing the elaborate mechanical gifts that Macartney and his officials judged too fragile to be transported any farther. On Thursday the embassy crossed the Great Wall. On Saturday evening Macartney ordered a rehearsal of the ceremonial entrance “with which [the embassy] was to make [its] appearance at the imperial court” to the sound of the Duke of  York’s March.70 On Sunday, two miles short of their destination, Macartney ordered that the embassy stop to “dress and marshall” a procession for his “public entry.” As Macartney reports in his diary, it “made a splendid show.”71 The parade was led by “an hundred Mandarins on horseback,” followed by Macartney’s own military detachment. These included fourteen dragoons, a drum and fife, nine artillerymen (their cannons, however, had been left in Beijing), eighteen infantry, ten servants and couriers (in “rich green and gold livery”), and four of the five musicians (in the same costume). The gentlemen of the ambassador’s suite followed (“in a uniform of scarlet embroidered with gold”). At the rear came Macartney himself, accompanied by Sir George Staunton, young Thomas Staunton, and a servant (“a black boy in a turban”), all “in a chariot.”72 The nameless “black boy,” probably the enslaved servant of one of the gentleman of the embassy, was meant to remind observers of the nascent British Empire’s global trading reach from the West Indies through Africa to Canton. Samuel Holmes, who gives a slightly different order for

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the procession, reports that the embassy entered Jehol in slow march to the band playing “God Save the King.”73 According to Staunton, Qianlong was watching—­and listening—­from a nearby hill.74 Jehol was more than a place to escape Beijing’s summer heat (see fig. 4.2). It was a satellite capital: Qianlong spent three to four months a year there. Located at “the precise meeting points of China, Manchuria and Mongolia,” Jehol, according to Philippe Forêt, blended architectural styles—­ including Manchu yurts, Buddhist temples, and Confucian shrines—­into one “composite landscape” that “expressed the ultimate goal of Qing geographical policy: absolute domination of the ‘under heaven.’  ”75 The specific layout of  Jehol’s built environment and its elaborate gardens articulated the complexities of the Qing’s relationship with their nomadic Manchu origin, their Buddhist religion, and their role as China’s absolute rulers. Down to the last tree, Jehol was designed to send visitors a message, to which at least some members of the embassy were receptive. Macartney, for instance, would have been familiar with the use of landscape to underscore political and aesthetic meanings. In his journal he compares the landscape at Jehol to Lowther Hall in Westmoreland (in today’s Lake District), the country estate of his friend Sir James Lowther, for “the extent of prospect, the grand surrounding objects, the noble situation, the diversity of surface, the extensive woods, and command of water.”76 The embassy did not perceive as clearly, however, that Jehol was also a soundscape, clearly delineated by topography and architecture. The human-­made sounds within it were no less intentional than the careful placement of every stone, bridge, and temple. They projected the Qing’s absolute power over China. It took nearly a week—­consumed partially by continuing negotiations about the kowtow—­for Macartney and his men to be presented to the emperor.77 On Saturday September 14 at 3:00 a.m. the members of the embassy rose and dressed in elaborate uniforms, including full British court dress featuring a “plume of feathers” for the ambassador and for Staunton senior an Oxford doctor of laws robe with matching cap.78 Anderson reports that the embassy had trouble forming a dignified procession in the dark because the Chinese bearers of Macartney’s sedan chair “moved rather too fast for the solemnity of a slow march.” The band responded with a quick march. This led to trouble: “Whether it was the attraction of our music, or any accidental circumstance, I know not, we found ourselves intermingled with a cohort of pigs, asses, and dogs, which broke our ranks, such as they were, and put us into irrecoverable confusion.”79 Twenty-­first-­century readers, accustomed to Britain’s well-­honed reputation for political ceremonial,

fi g ure 4 . 2  View of  Jehol (Chengde). Anonymous, mid-­nineteenth century. US Library of Congress.

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might find Anderson’s description surprising. In fact, as historian David Cannadine has noted, incompetence when it came to representation was not unusual in this era.80 By 5:00 the “confused cavalcade” had reached the emperor’s great yurt, which Macartney later calculated was about twenty-­five yards in diame­ ter.81 The soldiers, servants, and band members then marched back to their quarters through Jehol. Holmes, unaware of the embassy’s brief to portray George III as Quianlong’s equal, reports that they were “mortified and terri­ bly disappointed, as they had promised themselves great things from a sight of the favourite and famous residence of the greatest monarch on earth.”82 At the yurt, Staunton interpreted the early hour as a sign of contrast between the Qing’s Manchu past as nomadic hunters and the “indolence and luxury” of those nations “that had passed through the various stages of civilisation.”83 About half an hour after dawn Hüttner saw a rider arrive and signal that the crowds surrounding the yurt should form up in rows. Thereafter everything was silent until “one heard, in the distance, music and the sound of gongs, and in all of the Chinese faces there was the impression of the expectation of something extraordinary.” Hüttner, at least, was enjoying all the ceremony. “Whatever a European might think of the pomp of an Asiatic prince,” he writes, “it has a powerful effect on the senses and through these on the heart of enthusiastic Orientals [schwärmerischen Morgenländers].”84 Soon the emperor arrived, preceded by musicians (see fig. 4.3). After greeting the embassy with a friendly nod, he was carried into the pavilion. Hüttner and the other gentlemen followed at a distance, taking their places “with the rest of the courtiers.” According to Staunton, all the Britons except him, his son, and the ambassador remained “at the great opening of the tent.”85 When Qianlong had taken the throne, a “religious silence” descended. Then Hüttner, presumably standing at the entrance to the yurt, heard “the most beautiful music” of the embassy’s entire five-­month sojourn in China: “enchanting tones” from somewhere in the vast tent. “The gentle sound,” Hüttner continues, “the simple melody, the clear succession of tones, the solemn procession of a slow hymn gave my soul, at least, the kind of élan that propels the sensitive enthusiast into unknown regions but can never be described to the cold analyst.”86 Macartney and his men had entered the inner sanctum of the Qing imperial soundscape. An imperial birthday such as the one being celebrated that day was one of the three “grand sacrifices” with which the Chinese received representatives of tributary nations. The rites would have been in one of four categories: auspicious, felicitous, military, or protocol-­related. All four would have featured their own music.87

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fig u re 4.3  William Alexander, “The Emperor’s Arrival at the Tent in Van Shin Yuen, or Garden of 10,000 Trees on the Morning of the Ambassador’s Introduction, from a Drawing by Capt. Parish, Roy: Art,” 1793. British Library, London.

The rite in the tent was a protocol rite (binli). The slow, solemn music was called Zhi ping zhi zhang (Suite to control and pacify).88 In his English-­language account of this scene Hüttner is more specific. The music, Hüttner reports, gave “at least to my mind that elevation to which only Handel’s music can raise it.”89 In an article for the widely read Neue teutsche Merkur, Hüttner, a Lutheran, recalled: “[The music] was similar to the old church chorales of my confession, and put all of us, not expecting anything of the kind, into a state of pleasant astonishment.” Hüttner asso­ ciates the music’s power with Jehol’s composite sound and landscape. “With­­ out doubt,” he writes, “the laughing morning sun, which shone from above on the wide and magnificent park . . . had something to do with our exaltation. But the music in itself was certainly very elevating.”90 Macartney’s journal does not mention the music directly but confirms Hüttner’s impression. “The commanding feature of the ceremony was that calm dig­­nity,” he writes, “that sober pomp of Asiatic greatness, which European refinements have not yet attained.” Some time after this music had sounded, Macart-

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ney, Staunton, and Staunton’s eleven-­year-­old son Thomas were presented directly to the emperor (see fig. 4.4). Macartney did not kowtow; he knelt on one knee instead. Staunton stood, in his Oxford robes, and his son stood behind him. At one point young Thomas approached Qianlong and spoke a few words of Chinese. From Macartney’s journal it is clear that he was nearly overwhelmed by the experience. His entry for the day concludes: “Thus . . . have I seen ‘King Solomon in all his glory.’  ”  To ensure that readers know he means this positively, Macartney adds, “I use this expression, as the scene recalled perfectly to my memory a puppet show of that name which I recollect to have seen in my childhood, and which made so strong an impression on my mind that I then thought it a true representation of the highest pitch of human greatness and felicity.”91 As Jürgen Osterhammel points out, by this point in his mission—­and certainly after it, when he made the journal available to Staunton for Staun­­ ton’s  memoir—­Macartney would have had every reason to resent Qianlong.92 Yet instead he reveals a private memory in order to make clear to his readers the sheer power of Qing ceremonial. Whether or not he performed the ritual prostration, it was impossible for him to remain a dispassionate observer (or listener). The experience compelled him to return to a powerful impression from childhood. Macartney’s contemporary and political ally Edmund Burke called the aesthetics of compulsion “sublime.” The entire embassy experienced Qianlong’s sublimity again several days later, at the official celebration of the emperor’s birthday. Once again they rose before dawn to be in place on time. Macartney reports that they were positioned in the garden outside the yurt, which was open to the outside. This time, however, Qianlong “did not show himself, but remained concealed behind a screen.”93 “All eyes,” the ambassador continues, “were turned towards the place where His Maj­ esty was imagined to be enthroned.” As at the first audience, the ceremony’s next phase was indicated by “slow, solemn music, muffled drums, and deep-­ toned bells . . . heard at a distance.” Then suddenly “the sound ceased and all was still; again it was renewed, and then intermitted with short pauses, during which several persons passed backwards and forwards . . . as if engaged in preparing some grand coup de théâtre.”94 Besides underscoring the drama of the moment, Macartney’s observation echoes a common Western impression of Asian courts: that their ceremonies often unfolded in silence.95 Then “the band both vocal and instrumental struck up with all their

figu re 4.4  William Alexander, “The Emperor Receiving the Embassy, with Key to Its Members.” British Library, London.

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powers of harmony, and instantly the whole Court fell flat upon their faces before this invisible Nebuchadnezzar. ‘He in his cloudy tabernacle shrined sojourned the while.’  ”96 The quotation is from Milton’s Paradise Lost. “The music was a sort of  birthday ode or state anthem,” Macartney continues, “the burden of which was ‘Bow down your heads, all ye dwellers upon earth . . . before the great Qianlong.’  ”  “All the dwellers . . . there present,” he goes on, “except ourselves, bowed down their heads and prostrated themselves at every renewal of the chorus.”97 This is certainly another commentary on the kowtow controversy (“the whole court fell flat upon their faces”). But Macartney also bears witness here to the kind of “sublime” listening familiar—­especially to members of Macartney’s generation—­from reports of the power of the music of George Frideric Handel. Nicholas Mathew has traced the emergence of a musical sublime to Burke’s philosophical reformulation of the philosophical sublime (in German, das Erhabene) in light of the popularity of gigantic performances of Handel’s music, first in London and then in German-­speaking countries. The power of sublime listening, Mathew argues, lies in its parallels to Burke’s account of how natural forces, divine interventions, and the acts of “despotic governments” can bring about sublimity. In aesthetic terms the sublime breaks previous links between music and linguistic content. A sublime listening experience compels; it does not follow reflection. It is prostration through listening. Macartney’s description of listeners actually prostrating themselves during the emperor’s birthday music even gestures directly toward a prime ex­­ ample of the post-­Handelian musical sublime, Joseph Haydn’s The Creation (1797). The clue is that in his diary Macartney slightly misquotes Paradise Lost.  There the “cloudy tabernacle” holds a she, the sun waiting to rise—­“For yet the sun / Was not; she in a cloudy tabernacle / Sojourned the while”—­ and not Nebuchadnezzar, a biblical stand-­in for Asian despotism. The passage Macartney cites, taken from Milton’s Genesis scene, is from the same stanza that begins “Let there be light.”98 Haydn’s Creation, the original English text of which is now lost, depended heavily on Milton’s epic poem. Haydn’s “let there be light” is punctuated by a dramatic and immensely loud C-­major chord. At that moment in the piece’s last performance in Haydn’s presence in Vienna in 1808 the audience members did not fall flat on their faces, but the players, some of whom were themselves unable to continue, were forced by applause and tumult in the room to stop performing.99 Mathew reads this kind of sublime experience as “a displacement of the di­­ rect forms of power into aesthetic experience.”100 In music-­historical terms this “authoritarian sublime” explains the popularity of musical works featuring

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massed choirs and oversize orchestras such as Beethoven’s “occasional” pieces for Viennese audiences around the Congress of  Vienna, and indeed his Ninth Symphony. Thanks to Macartney there might be an echo of Jehol’s Qing political soundscape in this story. H. C. Robbins Landon speculates that Macartney and Haydn might have met in early summer 1795, less than a year after Macartney returned from China. Haydn, resident in London in 1794–­95, would certainly have been swept up in the excitement of the embassy’s return. In his notebook that year the composer jotted down a few facts about the diplomat and his mission: “Lord Macartney was sent as Ambassador to China. Pekin is the capital—­Gehol [ Jehol] is the Emperor’s residence.  .  .  . The present Emperor is 83 years old. Everyone prostrates himself at his feet.”101 Macartney’s diary was not published until 1803, and then only in limited excerpts in Staunton’s “official” account of the embassy. So Haydn had his information either directly from Macartney or through an intermediary such as their mutual friend Charles Burney.102 In any case Macartney was a subscriber to the first British publication of the Creation.103 It is not difficult to imagine Macartney thinking of  Jehol during the “let there be light” passage when he first heard the Creation performed several years later. Perhaps, recalling his experience of Qianlong “in all his glory,” he reflected on music’s power to underscore the grandeur of a mighty ruler.

Theater at Jehol Over the next few days, as it became clearer that the embassy was going to fail politically, Macartney and members of his entourage continued their listening journey through the summer capital. Imperial ritual ruled Jehol’s soundscapes. Hüttner found his way into a palace and was struck by repeated whip cracking by Qianlong’s attendants. He wondered if the number of cracks was significant. Macartney and Staunton heard Buddhist monks chanting at a temple: their ethereal voices reminded Macartney of Catholic plainsong and Staunton of the sound of the glass harmonica. Macartney, touring one of the palaces, had a further encounter with Qianlong’s collection of  Western musical automata, this one so imposing that he felt moved to write in his journal that the ones he had brought (stored back in Beijing), “must hide their diminished heads.”104 The whole embassy witnessed elaborate entertainments including fireworks and performances by acrobats and dancers. Many of these featured offerings from tributary nations around

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China’s periphery. Macartney and his men, although themselves represen­ tatives—­to the Chinese way of thinking—­of a tributary nation, albeit one far from China, seemed unable to see much difference between these and more “Chinese” performances. And probably because the British were not in any way integrated into the imperial musical establishment, no one thought to ask Macartney’s band members to add their voices to the proceedings. Perhaps, after the near-­fiasco of their first appearance in the summer capital, Macartney thought it better that they too “hide their diminished heads.” The band’s shambolic march to Qianlong’s yurt was their last performance in Jehol. The celebrations culminated in performances of tributary dramas in the elevated kunqu style. The dramas were an enormous undertaking. Sung the­­ ater was ever-­present in China, from private domestic performances of nar­­ rative poetry given with by one or two players using minimal props to massive large-­audience renditions of the main regional genres. Most of China’s theatrical life took place on the streets, in performances by socially excluded itinerant players. Nonetheless some forms of drama, such as the genres permissible at the imperial court, were reckoned to belong to yayue or “proper” as opposed to suyue or “vernacular” music. Historians of Beijing opera regard Qianlong’s eightieth birthday, just three years before the Macartney Embassy, as a watershed in the history of Chinese theater, because the best musicians from all over the country came to the capital to participate in the celebrations, solidifying state-­sanctioned dramatic forms for performance in fixed theaters with permanent companies.105 During the Qianlong era the section of the Imperial Household Agency responsible for dramatic performances employed about 1,500 actors drawn from both permanent employees of the court and freelancers from independent troupes. A large propor­ tion of these were brought to Jehol when the court moved there each year.106 Macartney reports in his diary that on Wednesday September 18 he and his party were invited “to see the Chinese comedy and other diversions” with Qianlong in attendance. They arrived in time for the dramas to begin at 8:00 a.m. (they lasted until noon). Macartney doesn’t dwell on their sound except to remark that they were “partly in recitative, partly in singing,” but “without any accompaniment of instrumental music.”107 Hüttner concentrates on the construction of the purpose-­built theater in the park, in a courtyard closed in by various buildings—­theater boxes in European parlance—­with “very nice rooms” open to the stage.108 This theater was in fact the largest of the Qing court’s “three-­tiered” stages, the qingyen ge or

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“Pavilion of Pure Sounds.” Such theaters, their stages arranged on three levels, allowed for a high degree of stagecraft, including trapdoors for moving figures from one level to another and special effects such as water fountains.109 Staunton describes the theater as “belonging to the ladies of the palace,” a “small but handsome building” between the ladies’ “private pleasure grounds and the Emperor’s great garden.” Staunton also notes that the women of the court had their own segregated galleries above the boxes on the ground floor. From there the women could not see into the boxes. In order, according to Staunton, that they might satisfy their curiosity about the British guests, “one of the eunuchs conducted the youth already mentioned [Thomas Staunton] . . . upon a platform within the ladies’ view.”110 In the theater Qianlong took his place in a box across from the action, where Macartney and his senior staff visited him during an intermission. Macartney and his delegation may have experienced (and judged) what they experienced in the “Pavilion of Pure Sounds” as entertainment, but what they were really witnessing, as Andrea Goldman writes, were “elaborate displays . . . calculated to project the power of the regime . . . an integral facet of interdomainal and intra-­Asian Qing diplomacy.”111 Hüttner found the drama uninteresting. And, unlike Macartney, he heard plenty of music—­ which he did not like at all. “When one considers how liberal the Chinese are in their theatrical performances,” he writes in his memoir, “with wood-­ blocks, cymbals, and so-­called music, it is easy to understand that it required no small patience to be a spectator for three hours.”112 The performance that morning was a series of dramas, most of them mainstays of the Grand Sacrifice program expected for tributary missions.113 The next to the last, however, had been composed especially for Macartney’s visit, although he and his companions did not realize it. As Xiao­ qing Ye has recently discovered, the performances that morning included a new work, Si hai sheng ping (Ascendant peace in the four seas). Its plot is similar to other tributary dramas, which often involved gods or mystical creatures making arduous journeys to offer congratulations to the emperor. In this one the hero is Wenchang, the god of  literature. After a series of dances in which Wenchang is joined by star spirits and other benevolent creatures on two of the three tiers of the stage, Wenchang announces the arrival of envoys from the “country of  Ying-­li-­ji [England], gazing in admiration at your imperial majesty” and “sincerely [presenting] its tribute to the court.” He then recounts the embassy’s quick journey, which he attributes to Qianlong’s “benevolence and virtue” having inspired the heavens to send a “supernatural being” to escort the British delegation, “a marvel

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the likes of which has not been seen since ancient times.”  This sets up the actual story line, which involves a giant turtle whose “huffing and puffing” is “causing . . . wind and waves.” The storms impede the imminent return of the British guests. A battle ensues, played out on all three levels of the stage, pitting Wenchang and the star spirits against the giant turtle and his allies, various sea monsters. Virtue triumphs, the English envoys can return home, and “a huge treasure urn appears on the stage.” On it the audience can read four characters, si hai sheng ping (ascendant peace in the four seas). Wenchang proclaims that “the Sage Son of Heaven in his extreme virtue has reconciled them [the four seas] and brought them under control. . . . As a result the four seas are at peace.”114 Macartney understood none of this. Instead he summarized the morning’s dramas as consisting of “a great variety, both tragical and comical . . . acted in succession, though without any apparent connection to one another.” He was especially struck by the final work, a staple of the tribute drama repertoire, Arhats Crossing the Sea (the Sanskrit word arhat denotes a Buddhist figure on an advanced path to enlightenment). This work made full use of the tiered stage’s capacity for special effects, in this case involving water. Macartney understood that the gist of it was “to represent the marriage of the Ocean and the Earth.”115 He was particularly impressed by the final special effect of the drama, and of the morning: the arrival of a giant whale that, “taking his station exactly opposite to the Emperor’s box, spouted out of his mouth into the pit several tons of water, which quickly disappeared through the perforations of the floor.” Here Macartney shared a rare moment of direct communication with Chinese officials. “Two or three of the great men at my side desired me to take particular notice of it, repeating at the same time ‘Hoha, hung hoha’ [hao, hen hao; charming, delightful].”116 Forêt argues that the summer capital’s landscape was an “intelligible medium.” Macartney, an enthusiast of the English landscape garden, was able to read Jehol as a planned landscape, or at least to understand that it was one. But he and his companions seemed unable to hear Jehol’s soundscape as also a result of meticulous planning. They missed too much of what Jonathan Stock calls the “intimate connection between musical pitch-­ scape and political health” that was critical to Chinese state cosmology.117 Nonetheless, at several turns the British guests did perceive the sounds around them as part of a larger whole, for example, when Macartney and Hüttner used the language of the sublime to evoke the political power of Qianlong’s court music or when Macartney recognized that Arhats Crossing the Sea was meant to represent the “marriage” of two opposites, the sea

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and the earth. But even here he was unable to perceive the political metaphor that drove the performance, that of the Qing emperor whose marriage of “opposites”—­center and periphery, Chinese and non-­Chinese, sea and land, Buddhist and Confucian, Han and Manchu—­underpinned his dynasty’s power. The sounds of  Jehol were meant to do this too. Macartney and his men were listening as best they could, but they did not fully comprehend the ordered whole they were meant to hear.

The Listeners of the Future After more than a week in Jehol, the embassy returned to Beijing by the same route over the Great Wall. By the time they arrived it was clear that the mission had failed to achieve its political goals. Hüttner first fell ill and was then pressed into service with the local European missionaries who had translated official Chinese correspondence into Latin, including Qianlong’s peremptory dismissal of British requests for liberalized trading conditions. The German’s role was to render these messages into English.118 Macartney’s health also deteriorated: at one point he fainted during an audience with Qianlong’s advisers in the Forbidden City. When he was well enough his time was taken up with the challenge of saving whatever face he still had. One of Macartney’s interlocutors during this period was the very frail  Joseph Amiot, who advised him that the situation was not as dire as it seemed and that the embassy had made a positive impression on some, if not all, of the factions in Qianlong’s court.119 It is not clear if Macartney, who had taken such an interest in the ceremonies at Jehol, was even aware that he was speaking to one of the few Westerners who truly understood Chinese music and musical culture. Perhaps these circumstances explain why at this point in the journey the archive of the embassy mostly goes silent about Chinese sounds. The sound of Qianlong’s final appearance before his British guests, when the emperor (having returned to the capital from Jehol) traveled to Yuanmingyuan from Beijing to view Macartney’s gifts, goes almost entirely unnoticed. Only John Barrow, who had not been to Jehol, reports extensively on it. In his account he relies on literary allusions, just as Macartney had done in his account of Qianlong’s birthday. As Barrow describes the scene, “On each side, as far as the eye could reach, were several thousands of the great officers of state in their habits of ceremony,” including “military music.” “The emperor’s approach was announced by a blast of the trumpet, followed by softer music, ‘and at that

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time when all the people heard the sound of the cornet, flutes, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of music, then the princes, the governors, and captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces, that were gathered together, fell down and worshipped’—­ except certain strangers who, obstinately resolved to do no greater homage to any sovereign than their own king required, only bent one knee to the ground.”120 As Macartney had relied on Milton’s invocation of sublimity, Barrow here alludes to a passage in the Old Testament (Daniel 3), in which the Jews are the only ones who refuse to prostrate themselves to Nebuchadnezzar.  The skeptical Barrow, it seems, was immune to the aesthetic of prostration. He was not to be turned by the sublime and magnificent sounds that accompanied the appearance of the world’s most powerful ruler. Macartney and his companions each listened to China in his own way. Their varied sonic experiences open new perspectives on the embassy’s well-­ known story. Hüttner, for instance, vehemently disliked the military music he and his companions heard daily as they traveled though China, but he delighted in the regular sounds of the boatmen’s work songs. The music he heard at Macartney’s introduction to the emperor in Jehol overwhelmed him with its power and beauty. By contrast, later Western earwitnesses to Qing ritual used dismissive Orientalist language: for instance, some referred to Late Qing court gong ringing, whip cracking, and music making as “petty ritual.”121 For Hüttner and Macartney, sound mattered. Even if, as James Hevia argues, Macartney’s “public sphere values” helped him at times to af­­ fect a “detached” attitude of observation and analysis, certain deep sonic ex­­ periences—­such as the sounds of the imperial birthday, which evoked a memory from his childhood of  “the highest pitch of  human greatness and felicity”—­attached him, on a deeper level, to the new and strange world around him. Macartney also brought Western sounds to China. By filling his borrowed palace with Western music, he exported the British domestic sphere to Beijing, enhanced perhaps by instincts honed as the governor of Madras and ambassador at St. Petersburg to appear as grand as possible. He organized his temporary “court” in an open fashion, allowing the orchestra to give nightly concerts. He used their music to direct visitors to the real center of the palace, the “presence chamber” next to the music room, with its royal portraits. Chinese listeners, accustomed to the precise use of sound in im­ perial rites, might have found some of  Macartney’s sonic projection of  Britain hard to understand, especially when high-­ranking members of Macartney’s

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staff joined the music making. But all the same the overall situation might have come across as familiar. The orchestra and portraits were linchpins of Macartney’s very own guest ritual. Just as in the yurt at Jehol, in Macartney’s temporary palace sound regulated the movement of bodies in political space. Barrow was a more “modern” listener to China, susceptible neither to the sublimity of Quianlong’s music of imperial representation nor to the romance of singing boatmen. He drew explicit sonic comparisons to London’s “others” (financiers,  Jews, and women), thus making China’s laboring classes audible in a way that London’s already were, and therefore more problematic for his “scientific” readers. Jeng-­guo Chen has argued that the increase in European exposure to China following the Macartney Embassy, particular to its supposed poverty, nudged some Western perceptions away from a positive view of China and toward the negative one that dominated from the second decade of the nineteenth century.122 This change of perspective mirrors the transformation Jürgen Osterhammel has noted in European views on Asia from those of the touring aesthete to those of the “objective observer.”123 A comparison between the literary man Hüttner and the more utilitarian Barrow reveals something of the same transformation. Whereas the former, at least part of the time, allowed China to enchant him through the ear, the latter “objectively” found in China’s soundscapes just so much noise. Barrow was the listener of the future. In the 1790s, however, constructions of China belonged more to men like Macartney. Indeed, considering the history of his embassy from a sonic perspective reveals that Macartney did not approach his negotiations in a purely utilitarian manner. His agenda reached beyond matters of commerce to more abstract issues of sovereignty and its performance, as demonstrated by his concern for his band’s effectiveness and his insistence on its placement near the Reynolds portraits. Macartney’s apartments, like the scientific gadgets the embassy brought as gifts and stored at Yuanmingyuan, were meant to exhibit British “progress” in the arts and sciences—­and to offer a multimedia display of George III’s power. Philippe Forêt argues that recent accounts of the embassy, such as James Hevia’s, are “largely an intellectual construction of letters and instructions, presents and bestowals, receptions and ceremonies,” and he adds landscape as a critical category framing the embassy’s story. This chapter has argued that soundscape mattered too.

fi ve

Reading Burney Listening to China

C

Burney and Macartney

harles burney owed his next opportunity to learn about Chinese music to Lord George Macartney’s unsuccessful mission to China in 1792–­94, the subject of the previous chapter. Burney was closely involved in the mission’s preparations. Fanny Burney recalled that Macartney consulted her father “upon whatever belonged to musical matters, whether instruments, compositions, band, or decorations, that might contribute, in that line, to its magnificence.”1 The two men were bound to each other by a complex web of social acquaintance and patronage. Burney’s goddaughter Frances Greville Crewe, the daughter of Fulke Greville, Burney’s first London patron, was a relation of Macartney’s. Burney and Macartney were both members of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club, an assembly of notable writers, actors, politicians, and scientists that also included the naturalist Joseph Banks, the diplomat William Hamilton, the playwright Richard Sheridan, the painter Joshua Reynolds, and the statesman Charles James Fox.2 Fanny Burney, decades later, called the group “the pride  .  .  . of the Classical British Empire of the day.”3 Charles Burney’s interest in the mission was not only musical. As Fanny recalled, he involved himself because he was “always interested in whatever was brought forward to promote general knowledge, and to facilitate our intercourse with our distant fellow-­creatures.”4 Macartney, she continues, gave her father “carte blanche to his discretion for whatever he could either select or project.”5 Burney, who was paid £181.6s.4d by the East India Company for his expenses, took charge of preparing the embassy both to acquire new information about Chinese music and to make the maximum musical impression on the Chinese.6 According to Fanny Burney, her father was so engaged that Mrs. Crewe asked him to entertain a social gathering at her villa in

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Hempstead in 1792 with news of his work for Macartney: “Come, Dr. Burney, you, who know every thing, come and tell us all about China.”7 Burney oversaw the recruitment of a band for the embassy. The members originally numbered six wind players (later five, after one absconded), some of whom doubled on stringed instruments. As Joyce Lindorff has written, the East India Company, no doubt following Burney’s advice, recruited the band from the London community of German expatriate musicians, including two members of the recently professionalized band of the Coldstream Guards.8 Burney’s intention—­outlined in a memorandum to Macartney—­ was that they be capable of playing a large repertoire. “But as the Asiatics are chiefly pleased with wind instruments and instruments of percussion,” Burney wrote to Macartney (reflecting some of the knowledge he had already acquired from informants such as James Lind and Matthew Raper), “if some of the musicians could occasionally play [wind instruments] they would probably be more admired by the Chinese in the performance of simple melody than a complete opera band would be in executing the most artful and complicated compositions.”9 There is no evidence, however, that the band actually performed such a “simple melody” while in China (see chapter 4 above). In addition, Burney arranged for the embassy to procure a barrel organ from the London maker John Gray.10 Perhaps the organ was meant—­as one of many ingenious mechanical devices the mission brought to China—­to demonstrate the high quality of  British manufacturing.11 But its main purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of  Western harmony and counterpoint. In the Cyclopaedia article Burney reports that he had the organ programmed to play popular British tunes and, harmonized in the Western manner, the “Son of Heaven” hymn notated in Amiot’s Mémoire. The Chinese reception of this organ—­from Burney’s perspective a disappointment—­will be discussed later in this chapter. Finally, Burney gave Macartney yet another catalog of questions about Chinese music, listed in a draft of a letter to Macartney preserved in Burney’s papers.12 The first three questions address issues that Burney had been pursuing since the 1770s: the composition of the Chinese scale, its relation to the pentatonic “Scots” scale, and whether the Chinese cultivated harmony and counterpoint.  The next query is a request for specific information on the pierres sonores Amiot describes in his Mémoire, which was published after the first edition of the volume of the General History that includes the “Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients.” Burney tells Macartney in the catalog that a “specimen” of the stones “is very much wished,” as is “an account of their use in concerts in the field or as carillons.” Next Burney

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requests more information on the sheng, the reed instrument Burney had received from Raper and taken a particular liking to. Then Burney asks for a “general list of the principal musical instruments, the manner in which they are played, and [a] few tunes for each.”  To this Burney appends “NB. the time and accuracy of the Chinese melodies that are set on His Excellency Lord Macartney’s barrel organ are wished to be ascertained, as well as [those] of the Hymn sung in honour of illustrious ancestors.” Next Burney asks if “the Chinese instrumental music is distinct from the vocal, or have they only such melodies for instruments (like the ancient Greeks) as were originally composed with words in order to be sung.” Referring perhaps to the report he had received from Lind twenty years earlier, Burney then inquires if  “the Dramas of the Chinese [are] sung in a kind of recitative, or declaimed without music.” Finally he asks, “Is Music an honourable pursuit in China cultivated by the Nobility and [the] Literate, as an elegant amusement for themselves and their families? Or is it confined to a lower caste or order of men, merely for the amusement of others?” This last question betrays Burney’s own concern about the social prestige of the music profession. Burney, who rose from modest beginnings as an apprentice to Thomas Arne to high social prominence thanks to his musical abilities and erudition, had more than a passing interest in the answer. If music was practiced as “an elegant amusement” in China, there might be a firmer basis for musical understanding between China and Europe. It seems that Macartney delegated Burney’s list to the young George Staunton’s tutor, the German émigré John Christian Hüttner, a trained musician.13 In his later work on China Burney drew heavily on Hüttner’s report. About 1803, nearly a decade after the embassy’s return, the two men met often and corresponded intensively.14 Burney never published the answers to his catalog directly, although he included many of them in the ar­­ ticle on Chinese music in the Cyclopaedia, where he reports that Hüttner had provided “satisfactory answers” to a list of queries. But the responses appear in two other publications: Staunton’s account of the embassy and Hüttner’s own memoir. Staunton turns to Chinese music in his account of the celebration of Qianlong’s birthday at Jehol.15 Here, because he answers the first group of Burney’s questions in order, he seems to be working directly from the catalog or from notes taken in response to it.16 Staunton writes that “to Mr. Hüttner, a good judge of music, it appeared that ‘their gammut [sic] was such as Europeans would call imperfect, their keys being inconsistent; that is wandering from flats to sharps, and inversely; except when directed by a bell struck to sound the proper notes.’ ”17 He continues that

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“Mr Hüttner farther [sic] observed, that the Chinese, in playing on instruments, discovered no knowledge of semi-­tones, nor did they seem to have any idea of counterpoint, or parts in music.”18 Staunton’s mention of Hütt­ ner’s name strongly suggests that the young German was the intermediary. The qualification attached to the second observation (“in playing on instruments”) also displays a sense for subtle differences of theory and practice. Hüttner appears to know that the Chinese could perform semitones and wonders why they don’t. Hüttner’s German-­language memoir, published soon after the embassy’s return, likewise contains passages that read like precise answers to Burney’s questions. In a long section near the end of the book Hüttner starts where Staunton leaves off, skipping only Burney’s request for information on “sounding stones.” Hüttner begins by relating that the Chinese enjoy Western music as long as it is slow (“Unsere langsamen Gesänge gefallen ihnen” [They like our slow airs]), and that they are—­according to the Jesuit Father Grammont, whom Hüttner says he conferred with in Beijing, and who had apparently already provided musical information to Burney via Raper—­delighted “with the silvery sounds of our harpsichords, pianos and flutes.” In the same spirit as his observation to Staunton (and echoing the wording of Grammont’s letter to Macartney precisely), he continues that despite their attraction to Western instruments, “every third or fifth, as acceptable as they are to our ears, is a dissonance.” Here he turns to Chinese instruments: “They [the Chinese] only love octaves, and when they play on string instruments [for instance] the Samm-­jinn [pipa?] . . . a kind of theorbo with four strings, they almost always play the melody in the lower octave.” Other string instruments, including the yueqin and erhu, were “not unpleasant,” but the Chinese accompany these with the “most disgusting noise” of cymbals, drums, and rattles “and thereby smother all of the effect made by the soft and mournful tone” of the former.19 There follows a more detailed description of the erhu, an instrument that clearly caught Hüttner’s interest. Its tone, he writes, “is somewhat hoarse and doesn’t improve through playing; instead of moving from one chord [Akkord] to another in simple progressions, one has to drag [one’s finger] through all the semi-­ and quarter tones in between.” This technique soon becomes “irritating” to Western ears, “even if, were it to be employed more sparingly, as in our music, it would have a good effect.”  The same is true of the erhu player’s “continuous vibrato” (beständigen Beben). This paragraph concludes with observations about the Chinese flute, which has “a melancholy, muted sound, which fits the elegiac tone of their folksongs very

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well.” Hüttner’s observation about the erhu suggests that he himself was most likely a trained keyboard player without direct experience of string technique: he would not otherwise have described the movement from note to note as being from “one chord to another.” It also reveals his distaste for continuous vibrato on string instruments. His terminological insecurity perhaps explains why he does not seem to have tried Chinese instruments himself as the string player Matthew Raper had done in Canton: the Chinese did not use instruments with keyboards at the time. Following the order of Burney’s list of questions, Hüttner then turns to vocal music and theater. Here as before his impressions are mixed. “The Chinese, even young boys, almost always sing in falsetto, which makes their vocal music sound more like tootling [Dudeln] than song,” he writes. Many of his companions, he continues, “compared Chinese song to the mewing of cats, and their frequent trilling reminds foreign listeners often of the bleating of goats.” He then turns to the question of rhythmic notation, next on Burney’s list. “It is untrue,” he reports, “as many [in the West] believe, that there is no meter in Chinese music.” Perhaps, he suggests, such a conclusion comes from lack of practical experience. “Meter [Takt] . . . is not the product of reflection,” he writes, “such as is our musical notation, but the natural accompaniment to every melody.” Meter, in other words, is innate to Chinese music and does not require specific notation. Indeed, “there might be individual people who have no feeling for meter; but they are exceptions, and never has there been an entire nation made up of such exceptions.”  The Chinese have instruments, he continues, with which they keep time in theatrical singing. Indeed, everywhere the musically knowledgeable members of the embassy heard Chinese theater they heard “the most rhythmic song.” The best theatrical music, Hüttner concludes, was in Canton, “where we were astounded by the excellent performance of a troupe from Nanjing” who surprised him with “an opera that included not only very natural recitatives but also very expressive arias, sung in the right tempo throughout and accompanied with appropriate instrumental music.” Hüttner does not directly answer the final question in Burney’s catalog, about the social status of Chinese musicians, although he must have told Burney something about their hosts’ confusion over the musical participa­ tion of high-­ranking members of the embassy. As we shall see, Burney relates this in his article for Rees’s Cyclopaedia. Burney set the terms for Hüttner’s in-­person exploration of Chinese music, and Hüttner procured answers—­given across his own text and Staun­­ ton’s—­to most of Burney’s questions. Had Burney been able to produce a

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more coherent summary of his research into China’s music than he eventually did, their detailed and well-­informed observations would have taken their place next to Amiot’s much wider-­ranging work among the most important outside accounts of Chinese music in the eighteenth century. In the event, they have remained buried in Hüttner’s German-­language memoir and Staunton’s long-­winded “official” account of the embassy.20 The Quianlong emperor showed little interest in the scores of mechanical gadgets the embassy brought him, including Burney’s barrel organ. It was returned to the company and sold in Canton.21 All in all, what Burney heard back from Macartney and his men left him just as perplexed about Chinese music making as he had always been. A few years after the return of the embassy, still in this state of perplexity, Burney began work on the summation of his decades of work on Chinese music, his contribution to the Cyclopaedia.

“Chinese Music”: Past In 1801, at the age of seventy-­five, Burney began work on a series of articles about music for Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. When he started work for Rees, whose project was a complete revision of the then-­standard Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, the widower Burney had just moved to an apartment at the Royal Hospital in Chel­­ sea, where he had been the organist since 1783.22 Burney’s draft of a letter to Hüttner in 1802 describes the state of his materials on China, even six years after his move. “The [China papers] have been mixed,” he writes, so that he “is not certain which came from Canton in 1777 or from Pekin in 1794.” But Burney was sure that some of his materials were written in Hüttner’s hand, “particularly the descriptions of the instruments with which Lord Macartney honoured him.”  The letter ends with an invitation to Hüttner to visit so they can go through the material together.23 In the absence of other information this draft letter must serve as terminus post quem for Burney’s earnest work on China for Rees. Burney seems to have finished the articles for the volume “in letter C” in 1806.24 The article on Chinese music does not make for smooth reading. Burney’s altered circumstances show in its fits, starts, digressions, and even outbursts. Most of his previous scholarly interlocutors were now dead, and his daughter (and dependable editor) Fanny, now Fanny d’Arblay, was trapped by war in Napoleon’s France. Burney begins with a sweeping review of the literature. Du Halde, “whose information did not much enlighten us” has

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been joined more recently by Amiot, Roussier, La Borde, and the “authors of the Encyclopédie Méthodique.” Jean-­Benjamin de La Borde’s multivolume Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne includes some information on China, but most of it is derived from Roussier and Amiot.25 The Encyclopédie méthodique does contain an extensive article on Chinese music by Pierre-­Louis Ginguené, one of the project’s main editors. The article, which is far better organized and more concerned with technical details than Burney’s, quotes extensively from Amiot’s writings, published and unpublished, and from Arnaud’s stand-­alone publications of the 1760s.26 “Little would remain to be said,” Burney continues, “if we had not other references from which to draw that which may, perhaps, vary our narrative if not interest the reader.”27 What Burney means here is that despite the erudition of the French literature on Chinese music, he has access to empirical reports that his Paris colleagues did not have. Burney then explains that he has been pursuing questions about Chinese music for a long time. He reports that he “did not forget” China, the “most ancient, extensive, and polished empire that exists,” during his work on the General History. He lists the sources he had gathered in more than three decades of study, including written materials and instruments he received from Matthew Raper and “further information from books and var­ ious other inquiring friends.”28 Then come the “satisfactory answers . . . received to most of the queries delivered” to the Macartney Embassy, “drawn up by the learned and ingenious Mr. Hüttner” along with “another chest of instruments and a gong” received thanks “to the kindness and liberality of Lord Macartney.” “Music,” Burney continues, “has powers so apposite over human affections, that wherever it is cultivated it is sure of two sets of friends . . . the grave and the gay.” The Chinese, he explains, are “the most grave, formal, and frigid people on the globe.” They are unusually attached to their most ancient music, even though they have surely lost touch with how it once sounded. This is because, he adds with a Voltairean flourish, “like all of the arts and sciences, [music] rises and falls with the circumstances of history. Its forms are periodically lost and rediscovered, then only to be lost again.” Drawing lyrically on his own experience as a music historian, Burney ex­­ claims that past music can be recovered only with “long labour, study and ex­­ perience; again to be lost, and again to be found! Per omnia secula seculorum! ” Burney then turns to mythical origins. Roussier, Arnaud, and La Borde, he reports, had all examined information about Chinese music for signs of

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possible affiliations with European music’s own creation stories: “Egypt had its Mercury  Trismegistus,” who “by the sweetness of his lyre, civilised mankind.” Greece, he continues, “had its Orpheus and Amphion, who by their strains stopt the course of rivers, made rocks dance, and even in the infernal regions silenced Cerberus himself.” Europe, however, “has still to learn that China had its own philosophical musicians  .  .  . whose strains have been equally miraculous in taming the most furious wild beasts, and in civilising mankind, often more ferocious than beasts themselves.” Yet despite this nod to Amiot—­who had brought the stories of Chinese music’s mythical origins to the attention of European readers—­Burney is not convinced of the ultimate utility of such speculation. He concludes that they are “never to be literally understood.” What is left are repeated performances of “ancient” tunes by contemporary Chinese musicians. Indeed, he concludes, “there seems at present in the music of China [to be] less enchantment than [in] our own.” Thus disenchanted, traditional Chinese music sounds “vulgar”—­that is, not “cultivated” in the sense in which Burney uses the word. “The vulgar of all na­­ tions,” Burney writes, “prefer their old traditional tunes to the finest compositions, and most exquisite performances that have ever been heard in an opera-­house.”  The octogenarian Burney does not mince words. Traditional, “popular” music—­wherever it sounds—­can never compare with the great performances of “present” music Burney knew from the opera houses of Naples, Rome, Paris, and London. These, for him, are sites of true musical cultivation and “enchantment.” At this point a well-­meaning editor might have asked Burney to account for evidence of lively practices of Chinese musical theater such as those experienced by the Macartney Embassy and discussed later in the article. But Burney leaves his discussion there and turns to Amiot’s description in the opening pages of his Mémoire of how performances of music by Rameau and Blavet failed to impress the Chinese.29 Amiot ascribed this to the Chinese obsession with their country’s lost ancient music. Its melodies supposedly produced rapturous effects on the literate Chinese upper classes and were far superior to any music of the present. Burney speculates that the problem might lie elsewhere. “If Père Amiot,” he writes, “had tried to convert the Chinese to a love for European music by French singing, we should not gave wondered at its failure.”30 But, as Burney points out, Amiot had chosen instrumental music, “so that if [he] did justice to the touch-­ stones with which he tried the feelings of the Chinese, it was natural to expect a different result.”

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Burney then recounts the results of his own musical experiments. The performances of the repertoire he selected for Macartney’s band, as memoirs by the embassy’s participants confirm, had no particular effect on Chinese listeners, including officials of the emperor’s own musical establishment.31 By way of explanation, Burney offers the fate of his mechanical organ. The organ took a familiar Chinese tune, played it once by itself, then added further voices in harmony and counterpoint. In the Cyclopaedia Burney explains what he intended the organ to do: “As it was well known that, with all their long cultivation of music, the Chinese had not arrived at counterpoint, or music in parts, the author of this article tried to betray them into a love of harmony, and ‘the concord of sweet sounds.’ ”32 Listeners in imperial Beijing did not appreciate this attempt to demonstrate the backwardness of their own music. Depending no doubt on observations Hüttner must have conveyed to him, Burney writes: “The additional part confused and bewildered them; they disfigured the air, rendered it doubt­­ ful which was the principal sound, adding that such music was too compli­ cated for them, and required more attention than they were accustomed to give their own airs.” Burney knew that Chinese music history did not conform to the model of musical progress set out in the General History, the movement from one voice alone to many voices in harmony and counterpoint. Nonetheless, by staging this process using a barrel organ, Burney had meant to test his proposition empirically. He had done the same in London in the 1770s. Through his son James, Burney made the acquaintance of Omai, a native Tongan who came to Britain with Cook’s second expedition. The elder Burney encountered Omai, who often was “shown” at high society events, at an opera performance. According to Fanny Burney’s edition of her father’s memoirs, Omai overcame his initial dislike of  Italian opera.33 In the China article Burney’s argument then takes a surprisingly self-­ reflexive turn. Instead of blaming the Chinese for rejecting “more advanced” European harmony and counterpoint, Burney is moved by the story of the barrel organ to ask if his model of musical progress might be wrong after all. “Such are the effects which our harmony has on the ears of the most enlightened Chinese, and indeed on those of all the nations out of Europe,” he writes, “so that the opinion of Rousseau, that ‘our harmony is only a Gothic and barbarous invention, which we should never have thought of, if we had been more sensible to the true beauties of the art, and music truly natural,’ almost ceases to be a paradox.” Here Burney gets to the heart of his critical struggle with Chinese musical practice. Almost from the moment he first encountered any real information about it, he had associated Chinese music

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making with his overall idea that all music histories—­including European music history, which began with the ancient Greeks—­originated in the simple modal airs of a “national music.” Then they progressed, via discovery of a complete diatonic scale, to “real” modern music. Rousseau had made this imagined process a story of decline into decadence. The barrel organ was Burney’s attempt to put Rousseau’s claim to the empirical test. His Chinese listeners, confirming Rousseau’s theory, were apparently not inter­­ ested in “real” music, even if the process that created it was adapted to their own musical patrimony and made to unfold before their own ears. That Burney, nearly half a century after the querelle des bouffons, was asking if Rousseau had been right after all seems extraordinary. Indeed, the elderly Burney seems to waver here, drawn back to the polemical disputes of his youth and middle age. The moment does not last, in part because Burney is not convinced that much of anything can be known about Chinese music history. In the next section of the article Burney surveys what he has learned. He relates stories of Chinese music’s wondrous past, including Amiot’s description of the Emperor Fohi’s invention of the qin or Chinese zither, with which Fohi “began . . . regulating his own breath, and containing his passions within just bounds,” so that he might later “render [mankind] capable of performing actions worthy of recompense, and of peacefully cultivating the earth, which gave birth to the arts.” But this is all “symbolical and imaginary.” All Amiot can tell Burney about “real music that is intelligible” is that the Chinese, “long before Pythagoras . . . and even before the time of  Mercury himself,” had divided “the octave into twelve semitones produced by a gamma or series of fourths and fifths by the Abbé Roussier’s favorite triple progression.” Yet all of Amiot’s “scales, systems, calculations, and diagrams . . . leave us as much in the dark as ever as to what this learned music was.”  They left Burney suspecting that discussions between Westerners about Chinese music history were conducted in a kind of echo chamber. “Father Amiot,” Burney writes, “did not well know what do with his Chinese musical discoveries, till he saw the Abbé Roussier’s Treatise on the music of the ancients; nor the Abbé how to illustrate his Pythagorean ideas, till he saw the papers of Amiot, of which papers he afterwards became the editor.” All that came of the discussion was more theory: “In explaining and commenting on the work of Père Amiot, the Abbé had a good opportunity, which he did not neglect, of harmonising the Chinese system with his own.” Amiot’s sympathetic portrayal of Chinese musical cosmology, in particular the claim that there is harmony in Chinese music, irritates Burney

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even more. As Burney paraphrases Amiot, to the Chinese music stands for “the general accord of all things natural, moral, and political . . . an accord of which the science of sound is only the representation and the image.” Burney finds this absurd. “After all these scales and calculations,” he writes, “which seem to imply [a] real practical music, ‘which at once delighted the sense and gratified the mind, by the evidence of demonstration,’ we find that it was an allegorical music, as inaudible as that of the spheres.”34 Burney’s frustration with music that doesn’t sound and chords that represent abstractions reflects his dislike for another kind of musical idealism: Roussier’s Neoplatonist conviction that the “secret” origins of European music history lie in soundless Egyptian number mysteries exported to China and thence back to Europe. Burney concludes (in an ironic tone) from Amiot’s counterargument—­that China is the original source of such mysteries—­ that “Abbé Roussier might, with the assistance of the Chinese, become the flambeau [torch] at once to enlighten men of letters and harmonists.”35 Men of letters, Burney continues, would profit from “research into ancient usages,” while harmonists would be enlightened by the recovery for China of the “kind of musical omnipotence which it formerly enjoyed, and which it has unhappily since lost.”36 Even if Chinese “musical omnipotence” over Europe is a nonstarter for him, Burney does show awareness in his discussion of Chinese “ancient usages” that “Chinese music” may not be a monolithic discourse. Grammont, the French correspondent about whom he had expressed private doubts to Raper in 1777, now reappears, rehabilitated. Grammont “seems to have understood the subject better than Père Amiot,” Burney writes, and he quotes him, drawing on the manuscript, now lost, that Grammont sent to Raper. “To hear the Chinese talk of their music in ancient times,” Grammont wrote, “we should suppose it to be something marvellous: they confess, themselves, that not a vestige of it remains, and never cease deploring its loss.” Just as Burney doubts exaggerations about the power of the music of ancient Greece, Grammont confessed that he “can hardly believe that [the ancient Chinese] had carried the art of music to such a high degree of perfection.”  This is because “if they had, the present Chinese could not fail to have a kind of music at least tolerable.” Burney’s excerpt from Grammont ends with the report that a Chinese intellectual (“one of their lettrés”) had reported that “what we read in their books concerning the excellence of their ancient music, should not be understood literally, but figuratively, of the good harmony between the prince and the people, and the different orders of the state.” Burney puts his finger once more on a

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crucial aspect of many Chinese musical traditions: that music represents wider correspondences with the natural world.37 He even senses that this element of Confucian tradition must have been a subject of discussion in High Qing China, as indeed it was.38 Burney’s conclusion about Chinese music history mirrors the position he had reached so many years before in the “Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients” about the music of the ancient Greeks. Both are unknowable. Even his own independently sourced report about Chinese music theory “the MS tract” (now lost) procured for him by Raper, can provide “no more intelligence to the reader concerning the practical music of the Chinese than those . . . of the practical music of the Greeks, concerning which we know little more than the alphabet.” Burney reports that Raper wrote to him that “the more pains were taken to understand [Chinese music], the more obscure an perplexing it became, for want of being able to trace it up to its true principles.” Burney then turns briefly to the question whether the Chinese employ eunuchs (castrati) to sing “on the stage or in the palace.” In his answer he quotes Raper: “Some from Europe had been introduced to the palace early in the reign of the late emperor, as musicians, to sing, play on instruments, and teach others,” but today (in 1780) “no other use is made of them than as guardians of the wives and concubines” of the emperor and other high officials. Burney continues that he has “a letter, likewise procured by Mr. R[aper], from an Italian missionary, on the same subject.” Burney does not say if the Italian confirms the presence of European castrati musicians at the Beijing court—­which given the exclusively missionary makeup of the European community there seems extremely unlikely—­but he does confirm that this second informant “had been admitted into the imperial palace to perform to the emperor, among European musicians, who had been sent for, expressly, for this purpose.” Once more Burney demonstrates that although he was unable to get much purchase on Chinese music itself, he was surprisingly well informed about the institutional history of Sino-­ Western musical interactions at the Beijing court.39

Present Music The rest of the Cyclopaedia article is devoted to present Chinese music. If the ancient music of China is inaccessible, Burney writes, “but from books, equally fabulous with Egyptian mythology and the Greek Pantheon,” in the case of the modern at least “we can form an idea, not very wide of the

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truth, by correspondence and conversation with intelligent persons, judges of European music, who have long resided in China, as well as by drawings of their instruments, and by the instruments themselves in our possession, and by specimens of Chinese melodies (they have had nothing else) current from time immemorial.” Burney refers here to his own collection of evidence. This included his interactions with Lind, Raper, Hüttner, and others, alongside drawings he had acquired from Raper (or perhaps from Barrow’s Travels in China), and transcriptions of Chinese music he found either in Lind’s materials or in the treatises sent from missionaries via Raper, and publications such as Amiot’s Mémoire and Barrow’s book. At this point in the article Burney’s loss of control over the material becomes more evident. His paragraphs become shorter and more disjunct; at times he seems to be working directly from answers to the questions he sent via Macartney, or even from rough notes. The article concludes with a long quotation from Hüttner’s account of the Macartney Embassy that in parts follows the book in German that Hüttner published in 1797. Burney launches this section with a typical Gallophobic flourish. Music, he writes, “being appropriated to particular times and occasions,” is not en­­ tertainment in China. Indeed, “no Chinese Fontenelle need ask ‘Sonate que vent-­tu?’ the times and the seasons would save him that trouble.” In the “Essay on Criticism” that opens the third volume of the General History Burney had reserved special scorn for the French philosopher Bernard de Fontanelle’s question, which he described as one “to which all such recur as have not ears capable of vibrating to the sweetness of well-­modulated sounds.”40 In his China article Burney does not suggest that the only good music is unconnected to specific occasions or events. His point is more subtle. “The variety after which musicians and dilettanti are ever craving in Europe,” Burney continues, “prevents all popular effects from new music, however good the composition and performance.” Indeed, “Fine music can never have the general effect of familiar and simple airs, which require no science to comprehend.” Here Burney invokes the conflict between “simple,” “familiar” music and novel, “scientific” music. In the space of tension between the two Burney locates good taste. Chinese music may be refined by virtue of a long, if unverifiable, history, but it must fail critically, because it is at once familiar and simple—­and lacks science. By contrast, the best European music—­but certainly not all of it—­ combines entertainment through novelty with musical “science.”41 Music in China, Burney continues, is bound to unchanging rituals and thus “torpid.” Therefore the “ingenious inhabitants” of China remain unable to appreciate

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European music not because they are Chinese, but because they have had no experience of it. “People must learn to hear music, as well as to perform it,” Burney writes: “There is no forcing pleasure on any animal, and every man will be pleased in his own way.” He adds a Shakespearean gesture: “ ‘Not by compulsion, Hal!’ ”42 “The Chinese began with simplicity,” he continues, “and habit has fixed that simplicity into an immutable law.” But Europeans “began their present polyphonic music with complication and eternal change of style.” This change of style and the “effusions of unbounded imagination” rule out sim­­ ple music “and prevent any music from living to be superannuated, or becoming venerable for its antiquity.” In Burney’s ideal musical ecosystem change precludes canonization. From his vantage point, European music history since the “invention” of contrapuntal polyphony about 1400 had moved steadily forward toward the most “ingenious” and “scientific” of Burney’s European contemporaries. Burney firmly believed, however, that the music of his present would in turn be unseated and replaced by the very processes—­invention and the public’s thirst for novelty—­that made its composition possible. The wheel of  Western music history, in other words, was always turning. Chinese music (in Burney’s construction of it) does not seem to depend on such forces. At this point the article has broken down; it seems like a loose collection of notes, perhaps structured by the list of queries Burney sent with Macart­ ney. Burney intersperses his discussions of comparative aesthetics with a throwaway sentence about notation (forgetting the examples of gongche no­­ tation he had received three decades earlier from Lind, he believes with Rousseau that the Chinese had no musical notation until the Europeans gave it to them) and a list of musical styles and genres (“1. Court airs,” “2. Airs to inspire true concord and national felicity,” etc.) taken from Amiot’s Mémoire. He continues with descriptions of various Chinese instruments, drawing on Amiot and Hüttner as well as his own attempts to play what Burney calls the “Ching.” From his description this is clearly a sheng or mouth organ. “Its tune is more sweet and delicate,” Burney writes, “than any of our wind instruments.” Burney reports that he owns three of them, which he plays in an unorthodox manner. Instead of attempting Chinese melodies, Burney reports using the sheng to produce chords, “which, if harmonically proportioned, like the tones of our instruments, would greatly delight ears well organised.” Roussier, Burney explains, used the sheng’s ability to produce twelve semitones in an octave to demonstrate that the ancient Chinese knew the triple progression. Burney wonders if this means

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the Chinese might know semitones after all. The paragraph ends with a cryptic question: “But query, how can we reconcile this to there being no semitones in Chinese melodies?” A few lines later he concludes, plaintively, that “the scale to this sweet little instrument, remains the grand desideratum in Chinese music.” Burney turns next to the sound of Chinese singing. “Most of [the Chinese],” he writes, “sing in falsetto, and it seems as if a natural voice was as much disliked by them, as the original shape of a woman’s foot.” Chinese singers use too much vibrato: “[Their] unnatural method of singing is not improved by the perpetual tumultuous motion of the voice.” From the use of falsetto singing Burney deduces that the Chinese dislike any kind of lower-­frequency tones. Indeed, he had already suspected as much when, in the run-­up to the Macartney Embassy, he had advised that the mission’s band include a variety of treble voices. He notes nonetheless that the Chinese had shown the most interest in the band’s bassoon, which Macartney in turn offered to leave in China as a gift.43 As Burney reports (somewhat garbling the story as its appears in other sources), “the [Chinese] declined the acceptance and immediately set a joiner to work, who placing it on the ground, took the exact dimensions of its several joints, keys, etc., and made one for themselves.” There follows a brief paragraph about Chinese musical theater. Burney reports that “their tragic scenes are accompanied with all the noise of drums, gongs, etc., and the screaming and bawling of mandarins, after which they commonly introduce love scenes and pastoral entertainment.” He adds that “all the Chinese airs which we have heard are in common time.” The next six paragraphs quote Hüttner’s report of his journey to China as a member of the Macartney Embassy. They are very similar to some of the reports on music in Hüttner’s German-­language book discussed in the previous chapter. Since the book was never published in English, it is possible that they are taken from a separate document prepared to answer the questions about Chinese music that Burney had given Macartney in 1792. Burney makes no attempt to hide Hüttner’s considerably more favorable impression of at least some Chinese music. For instance, Hüttner reports that “most of our party . . . though ignorant of the Chinese language” enjoyed the performance of an opera in Canton given “by natives of Nanking” and were even able to follow some of the meaning of the text, “entirely owing to the excellent imitation of the different accents of the passions, and to their adequate movements and gestures.” But Hüttner disliked Chinese military music, which he thought “indeed miserable, and not at all

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calculated to inspire courage. . . . Hautboys and horns together make such a continued and jarring noise, as if they vied with each other to imitate the bawling of cats.” Next comes Hüttner’s favorable impression of the music performed just before the Qianlong emperor entered the large tent at his summer residence in Jehol for one of his few formal meetings with the embassy.44 Hütt­ ner thought that the “soft sound, the simple melody, and solemn progress” of the music “gave at least my mind elevation to which only Handel’s music can raise it.”  The music, Hüttner continues, although instrumental, “resembled [hymns] sung in Protestant churches, but had no parts.” One of the instruments—­which Hüttner himself could not see at the ceremony because of where he was standing—­was “a bamboo syrinx” which was “doubtless a Ching [sheng].” This passage is very similar to the one in Hüttner’s German-­language writings. Burney’s long quotation from Hüttner ends with brief observations that likewise seem to be structured by Burney’s catalog of questions. Although Hüttner himself relates that he has not been able to observe Chinese reactions to Macartney’s band (he fell ill during part of the embassy’s sojourn in Beijing), he reports that one of the delegation’s interpreters told him “they like their own music much better.”45 Nonetheless, “[the Chinese] took great notice of the construction, neatness, and management of our musical instruments, as well as of our musical notation.” Hüttner is not sure if more than “a few individuals” in China use musical notation, which seems to be regarded as “more [of a] curiosity, than as the easiest and most accurate method of communicating musical ideas.” Indeed, Hüttner continues, “all the music we heard was played by rote, yet I have seen several printed Chinese books of music or musical notes.” In response to Burney’s question about the social status of music making in China—­the final one in the 1792 catalog—­Hüttner offers a revealing anecdote: “The gentlemen in the embassador’s [sic] suite, who were fond of music,” he reports, “sometimes used to take a part in the concerts performed by the band.” The Chinese were “surprised” about this. “Upon inquiring about the reaction,” Hüttner continues, “I learnt that that they, like the Romans, thought music no proper amusement for a gentleman.” Here, at the end of his long quotation from Hüttner, Burney returns to his favorite Chinese instrument, the sheng. “That the exquisite harmony with which Mr. Hüttner was so surprised and pleased,” he writes, “was produced by the Ching [sheng] we have no doubt.” The sheng, “of which the tones are so extremely sweet,” he exclaims, “has harmony in itself ” because

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more than one reed can be blown at once. Indeed, “by chance at different trials we have found 3ds, 5ths, 8ths, and every interval consonant and disso­ nant in the diatonic scale.” Here the entry, and Burney’s China project, ends.

Reading Burney Listening to China Burney listened intently to China, or tried to, across four decades. His search for Chinese sounds was a journey with twists and turns. There were some dead ends, such as his fixation with Sino-­Scots musical affinities. The wide impact of this speculation obscures Burney’s considerable contribution to the Western literature on Chinese music. Taken together, the materials he collected from James Lind and Matthew Raper in Canton, his detailed correspondence through Raper with Western observers in Beijing, the instruments he received, the experiments with Chinese listeners he organized as part of the Macartney mission, and his attempt at synthesis in the Cyclopaedia article amount to the most significant attempt by any eighteenth-­century European outside China to come to terms with Chinese music and musical practice. Although in the end Burney remained immune to China’s sonic enchantments, the fruits of his decades-­long China project surpass anything attempted by the Paris-­based French historians he originally depended on. It is striking that one of Burney’s first instincts on discovering China was to seek out, via Matthew Raper, information about Chinese counterparts, the “living musicians” on whom so much of his research depended. In addition, Burney’s imaginary travels to China confirm Vanessa Agnew’s insight that he was himself a kind of Orpheus, a musical seeker of  “original” musical experiences.46 Matthew Gelbart’s The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music” approaches Burney from a similar perspective.47 Gelbart traces the separation between “high” and “low” forms of music making through Burney’s fascination with Celtic folk music and his widely repeated hypothesis that the musical practices of the Celts and the Chinese, because of their shared disposition toward pentatonic scales, were somehow related, together representing an “earlier” stage in the development of world music. David Irving’s portrayal of Burney’s integration of the South Seas into a putatively global music history likewise rings true concerning Burney’s research into Chinese music.48 Agnew, Gelbart, and Irving identify the particular perspectives that shaped Burney’s construction of the music of the South Seas. Burney’s China project asks us to look at such perspectives in a specifically Chinese light and to seek possible connections with

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the processes of communication, trade, and growing imperial desire that underpin them. British attitudes toward China, however, were different from attitudes toward the islands Cook and his crew visited. Travelers to China did not stumble on a lost paradise; they arrived in the midst of a thriving, if profoundly different, urban society. The Macartney mission was conceived of as an attempt to come to an understanding among equals: Burney and his contemporaries were well aware that the Chinese had invented gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and the printing press, and most of all that they had a globally trading economy. Yet in musical terms, because they dispensed with Western notions of harmony and counterpoint, the Chinese seemed to offer a window onto musical antiquity, all the more because Chinese history, as opposed to India’s, appeared to Western observers to be unbroken and unchanging.49 This sense of antiquity preserved made China relevant to disputes between “the ancients and moderns” such as the ones Burney’s contacts Rousseau, Roussier, Suard, and Arnaud had been personally involved in. In Paris both the Rameau and the Rousseau sides of the querelle des bouffons had championed Chinese music. Rousseau argued that music history was a history of loss, of retreat from past simplicity and truth. His opponents believed that their preferred style—­for example, the more harmonically dense tragédie en musique—­was able to tell stories in music more truthfully because it joined the latest scientific thinking to a tradition going back thousands of years to ancient Greece or even Egypt. The next querelle, between the Gluckistes and Piccinistes, turned on similar issues. Arnaud and his circle, all Gluckistes, believed much would be lost if the French surrendered to the simple novelties of  Italian opera. Their alternative, the revolution of Gluck’s reform opera, was partially predicated on the idea that Gluck had “rediscovered” a more authentic means of setting drama to music, one closer to the practices of the ancients.50 Burney structured his musical journey to China in light of these controversies. His global intellectual network was neither flat nor linear; it was hierarchical and uneven. Burney’s knowledge of Chinese music came via French music intellectuals, a Scots physician, an East India Company functionary, a peer of Great Britain (and his staff ), and a German man of letters. Indirectly he received information produced by Christian missionar­­ ies in Beijing, for instance, from Amiot through Arnaud and Grammont via Raper. The missionaries in turn interacted with Chinese colleagues. In addition, Burney himself experienced Chinese instruments in performance

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by playing them, as did his correspondent in Canton, Matthew Raper Jr. Each of Burney’s interlocutors—­direct and indirect—­brought a particular perspective to understanding Chinese music. Burney’s Parisian colleagues Arnaud, Suard, and Roussier looked to China for evidence of ancient music in the West. Such convictions were shaped in turn by other intersecting sets of fields. But Burney managed these in light of other discourses: the superiority of British “progress” in the arts, sciences, and manufacturing, for instance, or his own historiographical conviction that counterpoint was an index of musical progress. In Burney’s global conversation about Chinese music some participants could not make out what others were saying. But a number of issues were common to all its networked parts. Any Chinese scholar in mid-­eighteenth-­ century Beijing would have understood the stakes of an argument pitting ancient values against modern change.51 Indeed, recent research has shown that the Qing court, for reasons of state, favored both a strict construction of ancient Confucian doctrine and an openness to foreign musics, including Western music brought by missionaries.52 Burney’s query to Raper about the Beijing court eunuchs (who supposedly were taught Western music in the early years of Qianlong’s reign) and his request that Macartney determine the extent of the Chinese court’s interest in Western music demonstrate that he was aware of this aspect of High Qing cultural policy. There is no doubt that Qianlong’s court was open in substantial ways to Western music, at least at the beginning of his reign, not because of any cosmopolitanism in the Western sense, but because of the emperor’s political instinct that celebrating the cultures of peripheral peoples was a good idea.53 Burney’s China project suggests that another way to write the music history of the High Qing would be to place it in the space between the imperative of investigating the Chinese musical past from a properly Sinocentric (not Eurocentric) perspective and investigating China’s place in global processes. By the end of nearly four decades of engagement, Burney rejected Chinese music, or more accurately Chinese musical practices. This rejection says something about his own perspective. Burney found Chinese musical practices unsociable. They were too functional, that is, tied to specific moments in the ritual calendar. He also (in part mistakenly) believed that in China musicking was pursued only by persons of lowly social status, a personal issue for a man who had himself used the practice of music to enable an extraordinary rise to social distinction. Finally, he distrusted what he took to be China’s exaggerated and unhealthy respect for the music of its

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past. Burney’s ideal musical economy depended on dynamism and novelty. Music-­historical processes were for him results of a kind of transhistorical salon in which members of a public, be they ancient Greeks, Renaissance Italians, or contemporary Britons, came together to determine which music “rose” and which music “fell.” He shared this perspective with his contemporary Adam Smith, for whom aesthetic judgment was also a kind of market determination of value.54 What Burney hoped for, but never found, was a social field to share with Chinese musicians—­free of historical or national prejudice—­where such values might be brokered. On a global scale there is a parallel between Burney’s failure to come to terms with Chinese music and the failure of the diplomatic mission led by his patron Macartney. Both efforts were attempts to find out what happens when Britain confronts China (or any foreigners) with what Britons think are self-­evident truths. Burney’s belief that Western harmony and counterpoint were an inevitable result of natural development follows the same arc as the assumption about free trade. At least one of Burney’s critics, however, was not convinced that Burney the historian was listening well enough to the music he judged. In her review of the publication of the complete General History, Mary Wollstonecraft asked, “What is then to make a sensible heart vibrate? Dr. B. was aware of this objection, though he often loses sight of it, and speaks like a mere musician, whose heart and ears were not connected, or to use the language of Rousseau, whose ears were depraved by harmony.”55 Burney’s ambivalent opposition to Rousseau’s hatred of those “whose ears were depraved by harmony” lies at the center of his argument against Chinese music. Perhaps had he ever heard actual Chinese music, as his informants Raper, Macartney, and Hüttner did, in all its inventiveness of melody and tone color, his heart would have “vibrated” to it more sympathetically. In the event, for all his decades of effort, when it came to China his ears were closed. Later in the nineteenth century Burney’s liberal fantasy of a global consensus around “polite” music fell victim to the dynamics of a new global economic system based not on peaceful attempts to find agreement but on Western dominance backed by military force. Burney’s liberal perspectives, in other words, could not survive the iron processes of  Western imperialism.

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Listening to China with Forkel and Marx

E

German Music and the World

ighteenth-­c entury europeans did not construct china in a vacuum. They looked at China in light of their own changing sense of national identity. In that sense Charles Burney, as we have seen, formed a judgment of Chinese music based on his sense of what European music was. Chinese music was simple and “torpid,” in contrast to the complexity and dynamism of its European counterparts. Burney worked within an older set of national frameworks, using contrasts between French and Italian music that had fueled the musical querelles of the long eighteenth century. This chapter examines constructions of Chinese music shaped by a new musical force: German nationalism. Its subjects are treatments of Chinese music written fifty years apart by two influential German-­speaking music historians, Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Adolph Bernhard Marx. Forkel and Marx are known today for creating a nationally inflected canon of musical masterpieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and, in Marx’s case, Ludwig van Beethoven. Both used China, which they knew was a rival to any claims of global exemplarity, to frame discussions about German music and nationhood in ways that depended on their own understanding of what Germany meant. Both made their arguments in popular media—­an almanac article and a dictionary entry—­thus reaching out to the public that was then working is way toward a new Germanness in music through its reading. Indeed, as Celia Applegate argues, both were protagonists in the emergence of a German national musical identity in the public sphere.1 Likewise David Gramit, in his study of the genealogy of musical “cultivation” in Germany around 1800, argues that Forkel and Marx both saw China (among other faraway places such as India) as “stuck” in an earlier phase of music history.2 Here I follow the overall arc of Applegate’s and Gramit’s arguments but

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also attend to differences in expectations of what “Germany” could mean. Forkel imagined a different Germany, but not necessarily a world made different by Germany. In the spirit of Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Marx, a ser­­ vant of the Prussian state when he wrote about China, imagined Germany—­ and specifically German music—­to be an answer, or maybe the answer, to the problem of world history writ large.3 The first part of this chapter examines Forkel’s writings on China. The Göttingen academic figures today as a founding father of a specifically Ger­­ man construction of music history. But he did not shy away from global perspectives. Vanessa Agnew has highlighted Forkel’s critical interest in Polynesian music, inspired by reports of the musical experiences of the crew of James Cook’s three voyages to the South Pacific.4 Forkel’s primary interest was the use of polyphony in indigenous musical practice. Like Burney, he considered the movement from one voice to many to be the underlying driver of music-­historical progress and saw Maori part-­singing as an aberration, coming as it did from “a bunch of hungry and miserable cannibals.”5 To Forkel China seemed like the opposite case. Chinese music eschewed counterpoint, but its civilization undoubtedly was “cultivated.” In other words, Chinese music history threatened the developmental model Forkel depended on. Making sense of Forkel’s thought on China is complicated in that he plagiarized most of his only substantial publication on the country’s music—­a text that purports to review Amiot’s 1779 Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois—­from his French compatriot Jean-­Benjamin de La Borde (1734–­94). La Borde depended heavily on Amiot but also used secondary literature by François Arnaud and Jean-­Baptiste Suard.6 So Forkel’s “review” of Amiot’s book is not a review of the actual book but a collage of summaries of Amiot’s decades of writing on Chinese music. Even though his text was plagiarized, this chapter argues that Forkel’s sustained intervention reveals much about his idea of the right music for the new Germany that was emerging as the Holy Roman Empire left the historical stage. The second part of this chapter engages with Marx’s survey of Chinese musical culture in Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-­Lexicon der Tonkunst, which appeared more than sixty years later. Marx’s intervention represents a shift in Western attitudes toward Chinese music. He agreed with Forkel that Chinese music was inherently inferior, but he went further, denying the Chinese agency as protagonists of music history. In Hegelian tones he claimed that the World Spirit of music history, after finding its first legitimate home there, had abandoned China. Applegate argues that texts about musical

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Germanness articulated German nationhood long before the establishment of the German Reich in 1870. Yet Marx’s relationship with the Germanness he constructed was not straightforward. Following recent work by August Sheehy, I will argue that in his account of Chinese music Marx responded to pressures he felt as a convert from Judaism to Protestantism, from an outside identity to an inside one. Just as Forkel faced questions raised by changes to the political order of German-­speaking states in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Marx himself was caught up in the wider processes of  Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Despite this element of instability, I read Marx’s dismissal of China from music history as expressing a kind of German colonial desire avant la lettre. This desire manifested itself in increasingly urgent claims about the universal validity of great German music, articulated by Marx in Hegelian vi­­ sions of  history  “following the sun from east to west.”  That is why it does not matter that China was not, in this era, the actual object of German colonial ambitions, which began to manifest themselves only many years later, after the German Reich was established. Nonetheless, the rhetoric Marx employs has something of the colonial and imperial about it. Ger­­ man art music—­in Marx’s view a result of history’s arrival in the West and in musical terms specifically among German-­speakers—­in this era achieved the epithet “classical” by promising universal benefits to its listeners. Such benefits are widely considered to operate even today. They still supposedly accrue to contemporary listeners, including those in areas that fell victim to colonialism and imperialism, who are themselves denied the freedom the “music itself ” is held to enact. In this way ideologies of German art music, such as those Marx constructed to dismiss China from world music history, legitimize the wider Western imperial project. This chapter asks, What are the specific conditions that informed the production of knowledge about Chinese music in German between 1770 and 1840? How do constructions of Chinese music history inflect German writers’ construction of their own national musical community? For whose benefit are such imaginary communities established? Finally, this chapter seeks to understand how “Germanness”—­which both Forkel and Marx imagined in opposition to “Chineseness”—­might be articulated as a particular practice of listening. As Adolf Bernhard Marx’s contemporary and fellow Hegelian Karl Marx put it, “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.”7 A. B. Marx’s project was about the formation of a “German” practice of listening to music that would enable those who had mastered it to recognize in certain

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works history’s answer to nothing less than one of modernity’s paramount questions: What do we do with our freedom? As this chapter will argue, in musical terms answering this question required dealing with China first.

World History for a Young Germany Johann Nikolaus Forkel, a young man of modest origins, arrived in Göttingen in 1769 to study law.8 The newly founded university there had acquired a reputation as Germany’s leading academic institution.9 In 1779, after a decade as a student and then as organist at the university church, he was appointed the university’s overall director of music. He soon established himself as Germany’s first professional music academic in anything like the modern sense. As a writer on music he was inspired by the historical and literary movements that had emerged from the university. His student contemporaries included members of the literary group the Göttinger Hain, whose radical approach to poetry had national overtones.10 Forkel modeled his historical writing on the groundbreaking work of professors such as his academic colleague August Ludwig Schlötzer. Both the poets of the Hain and the historians around Schlötzer were to have a profound effect on For­­ kel’s construction of Germany and its place in a new world history. The previous chapter described Burney’s construction of world history as a story of cycles of rise and fall. In contrast, the Göttingen school of WeltGeschichte (sic), or “worldhistory,” negotiated two narrative strategies.11 As Burney had done, the writers of worldhistory brought to their work a much wider geographical reach. They attempted to resolve the tension between histories of peoples scattered widely in space, about whom Europeans now knew much more thanks to exploration, imperial conquest, and expansion of trade. On this wide canvas worldhistory sought to tell a unified story that moved forward in time, including all the world’s peoples on an equal narrative footing.  Jürgen Osterhammel argues that the result—­exemplified most clearly in Schlötzer’s work—­was an “inclusive Eurocentrism” that ad­­ mitted a place for other civilizations without conceding Europe’s growing dominance of the world.12  The resulting change of perspective partially decentered Europe, but at a price of narrative coherence. In Forkel’s case this crystallized in the choice between retaining Burney’s perspective of cycles of progress and decline or moving to a new one in which history only moved forward. Forkel, who knew Burney’s work well—­having plagiarized extensively from it—­chose a narrative in which musical practices in some places (but not all) developed over time toward greater “perfection”

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(Vollkommenheit).13 The widened scale of his history raised new questions. If music history developed on a global scale, did it do so everywhere at the same speed?14 China’s long music history posed these questions urgently. Like Schlötzer, Forkel addressed his historical writing to the broad German reading public.15 In fact, the Göttingen historians had assumed a special place in the German-­language public sphere of the 1770s and 1780s. They combined their roles as teachers of legal, political, religious, and educational elites with public advocacy. But the nation they—­and their music-­historical disciple Forkel—­addressed was not Germany in the sense of a modern nation-­state. It was the Holy Roman Empire, the geographically and religiously diverse collection of jurisdictions through which most German-­ speaking lands were held together by venerable interlocking sets of structures and institutions.16 Across the second half of the eighteenth century this public demanded more and more to read, including music criticism.17 In 1779, after having tried his luck editing a more old-­fashioned journal, the Musikalisch-­kritische Bibliothek, Forkel turned to the more popular genre of the almanac, which combined short reports, reviews, anecdotes, and more serious essays. The full title of Forkel’s almanac publications, Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland, reveals his national aspirations.18 The almanacs were evidently a success; items from them were frequently reprinted or plagiarized, and after a few years they even inspired a series of parodies.19 The last item in the 1784 volume (which came out at the end of 1783) reviews the Jesuit Jean-­Joseph-­Marie Amiot’s report on Chinese music, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que modernes, published in Paris in 1779 as the sixth volume of a large encyclopedia on China, the Mémoires concernant [les] Chinois. Forkel’s review, except for its opening paragraphs, is plagiarized word for word from Jean-­Benjamin de La Borde’s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne.20 La Borde uses material from Amiot’s Mémoire, but his discussion of modern Chinese music (which does not figure prominently in Amiot’s 1779 book) is in turn derived—­in most cases like­­ wise word for word—­from François Arnaud’s discussion of Amiot’s earlier manuscript treatment of Chinese music.21 We recall that Arnaud and Suard were key intermediaries in the earliest stages of  Burney’s work on China. As intellectually dishonest as Forkel’s “secondary” plagiarism is (given that La Borde also copied most his work from Arnaud and Suard), it brings Forkel’s attempt to make sense of China into contact with Parisian discussions of the country’s music, which, as we saw in chapter 1, depended directly on information from Amiot in Beijing. Oliver Wiener reads Forkel’s translations and his cutting-­and-­pasting

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from other authors as evidence of savvy navigation through an explosively growing literature on music history.22 Forkel—­with minimal intervention—­ used his collage of writing on China to bring Chinese perspectives, filtered through French texts, to bear on the problems of German national identity in music. He extended to Göttingen a network of discussions previously built around a Beijing-­Paris axis, drawing Chinese music into his panorama of music’s worldhistory and his deliberations about Germany’s place in it. In doing so he joined a long tradition of European writers who constructed Asia with the help of networks of correspondence between Jesuit missionaries and intellectuals back home.23 Forkel’s appropriation of La Borde’s writings created a new composite text in a widely read journal that stands out as the most complete discussion of Chinese music attempted outside France in the latter half of the eighteenth century. For all that it was clearly an act of intellectual dishonesty, Forkel’s collage of writings on China deserves attention in its own right.

Questions about Chinese Music History Forkel opens his review with the longest passage of original material in the entire text (four and half paragraphs). He asks how it is “that a people in the first development of the arts promises such excellent perspectives, and despite these attractive perspectives always remains at one point.”24 The evidence for this paradox is that although “[Chinese] national music remains as it has for many centuries, as stiff, unmelodic, unharmonic, and odd as one could possibly imagine,” it is still “able to move the hearts of the natives is the strongest manner.”25 To judge from Chinese music’s construction, Forkel continues, one “should hardly suspect that the Chinese, of all peoples, should have especially accurate concepts of the art.”26 Indeed, he writes, one discovers “a kind of theory . . . that contains concepts that are so exact one hardly be more surprised.”27 In fact, he continues, China’s sophisticated theory of music “stems from the earliest period of their nation.”28 In other words, the Chinese had reached an advanced state of intellectual engagement with music much earlier than most peoples. Which raises the question, Why hadn’t they built on it? Simply asking this reveals a cosmopolitan perspective. Like Rameau, Forkel assumes, for example, that the division of the octave into twelve half steps is a universal principle. The Chinese always had all the experience of music they required to build a theory of it similar to those found in the West. Why hadn’t they?

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Just as with Christian Wolff ’s exploration of Chinese sound worlds, wider issues are at stake. If humanity shares the same musical scale, then perhaps it shares the same morals. But then Western revealed religion, for instance, might not be so special after all. Forkel and his contemporaries were well aware of the explosive consequences of the observation that the Chinese could live morally upright lives without Christian belief, or indeed any belief in an exclusive deity. This is the same problem the philosopher Christian Wolff had faced earlier in the century. Accusations of atheism had hung over Sinophiles in Germany for decades and led to the celebrated dismissal of  Wolff from his chair at Halle in 1723 for praising the Confucian worldview in a public lecture.29 Indeed, some of Forkel’s teachers in Göttingen had lost interest in using China as a positive model, in step with the growing rejection of Chinese philosophies and cultural products across Europe and the increased distrust of Chinese political “despotism.”30 One of the most rabid anti-­Chinese historians was the Göttingen professor Christoph Meiners, who edited a bitterly negative collection of Jesuit writings on China. Forkel owned a copy.31 Surrounded in Göttingen by anti-­China opinion, it seems that Forkel didn’t wish to commit himself conclusively to a fundamentally Sinophile position. In the first paragraph of his review he refers to the Chinese as a people “about whom Europeans do not yet reliably know if they should be considered clever or dumb.”32 Forkel’s authorial voice then disappears for most of the forty-­one-­page essay. The first text he borrows is La Borde’s summary of Chinese thinking about the history of organizing musical pitch material, which was derived in turn from Amiot’s 1779 Mémoire. As we saw in chapter 1, the history of scales was a mainstay of French-­language discussions of Chinese music and its place in universal music history. Forkel’s use of it in the Almanach reads differently when one considers the likely interest of his journal’s readers. Arguments about which nation first organized music into scales paralleled intense discussions about how sounds were first formed into words and then into writing, and how language in turn shaped nation. The origin of language debate, which played out increasingly in the German public sphere, was also a debate about the origin of national sensibilities.33 By the time of the Amiot review, Forkel was working to translate this perspective into musical terminology. In the narrative of music history he outlined a few years later in the Allgemeine Geschichte, Forkel describes the origins of music as a process that began with the emergence of  “tone” from “noise.” In the introduction to the Allgemeine Geschichte Forkel observes that

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“primitive” peoples derive pleasure from “the sound of loud instruments.” This is because their souls—­as opposed to their bodies—­have not yet been “activated” (in Thätigkeit gesetzt).34 How long a people spends in this first stage is “impossible to predict.” Its duration, however, is linked to overall progress in civilization. “We find this stage,” Forkel writes, “even today in many Asiatic, African, and American peoples, whom we know have not made any further progress in other branches of cultivation [Kultur] in many millennia.”35 Forkel’s model bears similarities to Herder’s prizewinning explanation of the origins of language as a process by which humans used special cognitive ability (Bessonenheit, “reflection”) to turn sounds borrowed from nature into words.36 Similarly, in Forkel’s second stage of music history, people develop the ability to turn unorganized singing into more complex melodies. As they assemble more sophisticated vocabularies to describe the world around them, they acquire more complex musical tools. “Rough” music might be lim­­ited to simple “sounds of feeling” (Empfindungslaute). But as people develop sensibilities for the variety of  human emotions, “primary and secondary sen­sations, more or less pleasant, sad, happy etc.,” they realize that “the single high or low sounds previously used to express, depict, or imitate [emotions] are just as unsuitable as simple speech-­sounds are to naming external objects in their diversity and unique qualities.”37 Across Forkel’s second stage of music history, individual peoples (Völker) acquire ever more complex scales (for instance, by moving from pentatonic music to using the full octave), for the same reasons. Forkel’s third and final stage in music history dawns when people discover harmony and counterpoint, which allows for every melody to acquire countless further shades of meaning through variations in accompaniment.38 China, for all its long history of cultivation, evidently is stuck somewhere in this second stage. The origin of music in China, as Forkel/La Borde/Amiot report it, is birdsong. Ling-­lun, an ancient musician, travels to a mountain in northeast China and hollows out a bamboo tube. He blows into it and realizes the sound that emerges is “a pleasant tone that seems to match the one he makes when he speaks.” A short distance away a brook flows down the mountain. Its sound “seems also to be in harmony [Einklang] with his voice and the sound of the hollow bamboo.”39 Ling-­ lun calls out, “This the basic tone of nature!” But he wonders, “If all other sounds are to be derived from these, how should this be done?”  The answer comes in the form of a magical bird, accompanied by its female companion. “All the other birds were silent,” Forkel’s text reports; “the wind stopped, all of nature seemed only to want to listen.” The birds began to sing. Ling-­

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lun heard in their song twelve different notes, six from the male bird and six from the female.40 He realizes that the first pitch sung by the male corresponds exactly to the pitch he had made with his bamboo tube. He imagines that twelve such tubes, of differing lengths, “would give him the twelve sounds he had just heard” from the birds. Despite his familiarity with some details of the history of Chinese music theory, several years after the Almanach review Forkel ignored China in the passages of the Allgemeine Geschichte treating the origins of music. This is surprising: Ling-­lun’s discovery of the division of the musical world into twelve parts seems a textbook example of progress toward a rational music theory in which simple concepts are added together to make more complex ones. In addition, the fable of Ling-­lun illustrates precisely Forkel’s notion about the transformation of noise into sound, a key indication of musical cultivation. Yet it would have been impossible to tell the story of Ling-­lun in the Allgemeine Geschichte without fatally complicating Forkel’s overall model of progress. How could he have explained a people who were able to derive musical concepts rationally, and who understood the difference between noise and music, yet had not reached music history’s third stage, the age of harmony and counterpoint?

Questions for the Chinese Present At this point Forkel’s cut-­and-­paste operation moves from the earlier chapter on ancient Chinese in La Borde’s Essai, which is a close summary of the book Forkel claims to be reviewing, to a later chapter on the Chinese musical present. (It is interesting that Burney’s more original account of Chinese music, written several decades later, follows the same pattern.) La Borde’s source here is not Amiot’s printed Mémoire but manuscripts that circulated in Paris from the 1750s onward.41 Some of these were summarized in an article by Suard and Arnaud that appeared in the Journal étranger in 1760 and was reprinted in their Variétés littéraires in 1779, which La Borde claimed to have seen only after his book was in print. Whatever its ultimate source, Forkel builds this part of his review around La Borde’s long quotations from Chinese authorities, which appear in La Borde’s Essai exactly as they do in Suard and Arnaud. These are a purported edict by the Kangxi emperor (reigned 1661–­1722) and commentary on Western music by an unnamed Chinese expert. In Arnaud and Suard’s essay, the statements (although in the first person) are not enclosed in quotation marks. In La Borde and Forkel they are. By making this choice La Borde, and

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his plagiarizer Forkel, allows both figures to come across as real characters speaking directly to readers. Perhaps this was meant to remind the public of the many fictional “foreign” figures in European literature of the time. Indeed, the use of such imaginary, and sometimes satirical, voices—­often Chinese—­to comment on European affairs was a widely adopted trope. It was first used by Charles-­Louis de Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes of 1721; well-­known followers included Oliver Goldsmith, whose Citizen of the World (1760) features a Chinese narrator. The use of an imaginary foreign observer, in Jürgen Osterhammel’s words, allows for the assumption of a new “distanced, ethnographic point of view” of the other.  This point of view is never far from satirical commentary on the self.42 Kangxi, whom many historians consider to have been the Chinese ruler with the greatest attraction to Western music, speaks first.43 Even so, what Forkel/La Borde reports about him seems rather extreme. Kangxi, readers learn, was so enthusiastic about what he had heard from European missionaries that he ordered everyone in China to adopt European music and musical instruments. But he soon realized that in their hearts Chinese musicians “preferred their own ancient music.” As Forkel/La Borde puts it, “Stubbornness was preferred to truth, and prejudice hindered conviction.”44 Unwilling to upset his people the way his Manchu ancestors had by forcing them to wear their hair in a queue, Forkel/La Borde explains, Kangxi gave up. To go ahead would have amounted to forcing his subjects to disobey him in a matter “the value of which was not yet decided.”45 As a compromise Kangxi ordered the improvement of the instruments already in use. These changes are described in a long edict.46 This passage introduces German readers to Chinese ideas about the intersection of music and statecraft. Kangxi’s attempts to regulate Chinese musical practices are a good example. But stories about the capacity of a people to change their musical lives on orders from above would have struck a chord with German-­language readers as well. In 1780, on the death of his mother Maria Theresa, the Holy Roman Emperor and Austrian archduke Joseph II acquired political control over the Hapsburg territories, most of which were in Austria. He immediately unleashed a significant series of reforms including religious tolerance, abolition of serfdom, dissolution of the monasteries, universal education, and significant changes to the structure of his government.47 These reforms also included profound interventions in matters of musical practice, most notably the removal of most instrumental music from the Catholic liturgy and the stepped-­up advocacy of German-­language music drama.48 It is unlikely that Forkel’s readers would

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have missed the parallels between Kangxi and Joseph, especially because Joseph and his older contemporary and rival Frederick the Great of Prussia had occasionally allowed themselves to be styled as European equivalents of the Chinese emperors.49 Forkel’s appropriation of La Borde’s story about Kangxi is thus more than a curious account of goings-­on in a distant place. It is a reflection of specific musical concerns in greater Germany. His interest in Chinese emperors’ power to reform musical practice invokes possibilities open to their Holy Roman Empire counterparts.  Joseph II faced the same problems as Kangxi (“stubbornness” and “prejudice”) and managed all the same to achieve some degree of musical reform, albeit more modest than originally intended, within the bounds of a national community. In fact, the association of political power with musical reform was a key pillar of Forkel’s overall program. He shared an interest in the ability of pan-­German political figures such as Joseph II to effect changes in the aesthetic practices of their contemporaries. For instance, the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, a hero to Forkel’s friends in the Göttinger Hain, petitioned Joseph II to reform cultural life in the Holy Roman Empire by creating institutions around which a new German aesthetic in literature and the other arts could form.50 Joseph followed this in part, especially after he assumed direct power over the whole empire on his mother’s death. But by the time Forkel wrote this review, the reforming emperor was distracted from such projects by war. A few years later he would be dead and his program of intellectual renewal halted. The final section of  Forkel’s collage circles back to the differences between contemporary Chinese and Western music. It addresses two general observations: Chinese music is always slow, and the Chinese, even though they were equipped by their music theory to divide the octave into semitones, did not use semitones in their musical practice. Forkel/La Borde ascribes both to the Chinese love of  “simplicity” (Einfalt).51 The main voice in this section is an unnamed Chinese official, presumably an interlocutor of Amiot’s. The mandarin defends Chinese music against the charge of monotony. He claims that European music is too fast. If the intention is to prove that European musicians have greater skill in moving their fingers quickly, he argues, then he will gladly admit European superiority.52 If the point, however, is to demonstrate that all listeners must take pleasure from such skill, then the mandarin must disagree. Chinese ears do not tolerate confusion; musical impressions, to be effective, need to reach listeners without struggle and effort.53 The critical mandarin then compares the experience of listening to

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European music to an attempt by a Chinese artist to demonstrate “all that is interesting” in the history of twenty-­two Chinese dynasties in one painting or, even worse, to depict the same history in hundreds of smaller paintings and then to display them one after the other. In both cases “the truth of [the painting’s] expression,” and its beauties, would be lost.54 The mandarin sounds rather familiar. Like many of the imaginary Chinese characters who populated European literatures in this era, he speaks a local dialect. The comparison of music, a narrative art, to painting, a static one, recalls Gottfried Ephraim Lessing’s extended comparison of painting and poetry in his seminal essay on the antique sculpture group Laocoön.55 Lessing argues that while poetry unfolds dynamically over time, paintings project bodies, statically, in space. In addition, the repeated use of the word Einfalt (simplicity) to describe Chinese music—­in his own voice and in that of his imaginary mandarin—­evokes Lessing’s critique of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s use of  “noble simplicity” (edle Einfalt) to praise the sculpture of the ancient Greeks. Here Forkel draws readers’ attention to a complex field in which critics such as Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn debated the relative merits of the classic forms Winckelmann so admired versus the advantages of a more “modern” emotional naturalism. Just as this debate reached its apogee in the 1770s, a younger generation including Herder and Goethe took it even further with their celebration of  “primitive” poetry such as the songs of the (fictitious) Scots bard Ossian, championed by Herder, and the effusive odes of Klopstock, whose work figures at the crucial moment of recognition in Goethe’s Sturm und Drang novel The Sorrows of  Young Werther (1777). And if Forkel had actually read the introduction to Amiot’s Mémoire, he would surely have noted the overtones of  Winckelmann and Winckelmann’s musical admirer Gluck in Amiot’s spirited defense of the “harmony” implied in Chinese music by the seamlessness of melody and gesture. Even at second hand, Amiot’s mandarin must have seemed to Forkel like a surrogate in the never-­ending operatic querelles. Forkel, indeed, disliked Gluck’s music and opposed the composer in the final installment of the Paris opera disputes, the querelle des Gluckistes et Piccinistes.56 It is not clear from the review if Forkel knew that Arnaud—­a crucial conduit of Amiot’s thought to French readers in the 1760s and 1770s—­was a leading Gluckiste.57 Another key to understanding what China meant to Forkel emerges from the comparison of this piece of his collage with an original essay near the beginning of the same volume of the Musikalischer Almanach. For many German writers the alternative to simplicity was not complexity, but the

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union of simplicity and complexity evinced by the craze in Germany for English landscape gardens, or in the music of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, whom Forkel much admired.58 Readers of the 1784 Almanach could hardly have failed to notice the connection between Forkel’s effusive praise earlier in this volume of Bach’s most recent clavier sonatas and his harping on the supposed simplicity of Chinese music at the end. In an extensive and well-­known essay on the F-­minor sonata from the third book for Kenner und Liebhaber, Forkel pleads for music that combines ingenious design and simplicity of expression.59 As Richard Kramer has written, in the essay Forkel views the sonata as a piece of  “imaginative theater,” a narrative in “one dramatic expanse” punctuated with special moments of surprise and disruption.60 In his discussion of the Bach sonata Forkel also draws explicitly on Lessing, who argued in the Hamburger Dramaturgie that poetry and drama must unite structure and expression.61 In one volume of the Almanach, then, Amiot’s ideal mandarin listens implicitly to Bach’s sonata and finds it wanting. In Forkel’s collage-­like summary of Chinese musical thought, the mandarin stands in for a critic on the “simple” end of the current German aesthetic spectrum, skeptical about emotional naturalism, freedom from formal constraint, and artistic individualism. In the Almanach review, Western constructions of Chinese aesthetics invoke local arguments and grease the wheels of familiar polemic disputes.

Forkel’s China Forkel apparently did not even bother to read the major work on Chinese music he purported to review in the Almanach. That does not make his in­­ tervention less important. In his “review” he made the answer to a global problem (Why do different cultures hear music differently?) relevant to local questions such as the role of political authorities in setting national musical agendas and the right balance of simplicity and complexity in music. His discussion of Chinese stories of the origins of music acknowledges that non-­European peoples could experience crucial moments of transition toward greater musical cultivation, even if they did not in the end achieve the same results Forkel thought marked the West. This is Osterhammel’s cosmopolitan “inclusive Eurocentrism.” China co-­constituted Forkel’s intellectual agenda and his vision of a new German nation based on shared musical sensibilities. If only briefly, Forkel allowed real Chinese voices, however attenuated, to assume a central role in his project of constructing a history of world music fit for a new Germany.

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There was more at stake than music. To argue for union of the simple and the complex in art was to support a political solution to the problem of Germany that involved a strong, wise emperor-­king (like Joseph, Frederick, or Kangxi) and respect for the diversity of the German-­speaking nations.62 Forkel and his comrades in the Göttinger Hain sought in literature and music a solution to the “problem” of Germany that allowed for the presence of conflicting elements: feeling and order, novelty and tradition, and local and national feeling.63 Lessing’s dramas, Klopstock’s odes, and Goethe’s novels all allowed for such a dual presence. Forkel’s suggestion that Bach’s sonata from the collection for Kenner und Liebhaber did too. So what the Chinese (and perhaps others on the wrong side of  Forkel’s polemics, such as Gluck) offered was not what Germany needed at the political juncture where it found itself: whatever else Chinese music might have stood for, it certainly did not—­to a commentator such as Forkel, who would have been unaware of Chinese music’s timbral complexities—­embrace a back-­and-­ forth between complexity and simplicity. In the decades that followed, Chinese music, apart from the reports by the Anglo-­German translator and China traveler John Christian Hüttner and fleeting references in the young Sinological literature, disappeared from the German public sphere.64 Hüttner’s work in particular, which included positive firsthand accounts of musical practices both at the imperial court and in the provinces, seems to have gone completely unnoticed by musical writers. As late as 1827, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink simply recycled the descriptions in Amiot’s Mémoire—­then nearly eighty years old—­in his article on Chinese music for a widely circulated popular encyclopedia.65 The place of China in world music history, however, was soon to attract the attention of Fink’s bitter rival Adolf Bernhard Marx, a major presence in German musical letters from the 1820s onward. Like Forkel, Marx was interested in Chinese music for its political resonance, particularly as regards the harmony of music and statecraft. Similarly, Marx filtered his perception of China through his own experience, in this case as a converted Jew in Prussia. But unlike Forkel, Marx has no interest whatever in what Chinese musicians actually had to say.

Listening to China with A. B. Marx Adolf Bernhard Marx is remembered today as a pioneering analyst of mu­ sical form and an advocate of German instrumental music. As Celia Applegate and others have argued, he helped to establish a specifically musical

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German national identity.66 Like Forkel, originally a law student, Marx arrived in Berlin in 1822 and soon left the law for music journalism.67 In 1824 he was appointed founding editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, modeled on Friedrich Rochlitz’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in Leipzig. Rochlitz’s journal, founded in 1797, helped establish the critical reputations of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven: one means its authors used was placing these composers in the context of philosophical idealism and German national sentiment.68 Following in Rochlitz’s footsteps, Marx set out to marshal critical opinion behind the march of more “profound” genres such as German instrumental music and vocal music by past “German” masters. He became a key protagonist of Beethoven’s reception during the composer’s lifetime and wrote effusively about Handel, whom he counted as German despite the composer’s decades of residence in Britain.69 In addition, as a member of Mendelssohn’s circle, he helped prepare the way for the young composer’s revival of  J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829.70 Marx used the pages of the BAMZ to prepare his reading public for Mendelssohn’s performance of the work with the Berlin Singakademie, led by Carl Friedrich Zelter, Mendelssohn’s teacher. Marx profited from the success of this and other projects: in 1830 he was appointed to a teaching position at the University of Berlin; the journal closed soon afterward. Marx campaigned against the supposed shallowness of Italian opera, particularly the works of Rossini.71 Marx married this critical position to the deeply Hegelian theory of music history he laid out in the pages of the BAMZ. Indeed, Marx, despite probably having had little or no direct contact with the living Hegel, became over time one of the earliest and most enthusiastic adaptors of Hegelian thought among German writers on music.72 Marx employed Hegelian terminology on two levels. First, he positioned his own critical project as a dialectical answer to the one championed in Rochlitz’s “Kantian” AMZ by raising the rhetorical temperature around the superiority of the music he favored. In Hegelian terms, he saw his own work as evidence of a new phase of the musical spirit’s continuing journey toward better understanding of itself, a process that was necessarily coming to fruition in contemporary Prussia. In contrast, Rochlitz and his colleagues had stressed the emergence of a special German music that was valuable “for itself ” in a Kantian sense, without tying this to an overarching historical narrative of  “necessity.” Second, he used the pages of the BAMZ to propose a theory of music history broadly analogous to Hegel’s outline of world history.73 This will become particularly apparent in his treatment of Chinese music.74 In the

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fourth volume of the BAMZ, Marx outlined a history of music (at first limited to the West) in three periods, which he names as church, feudalism, and people (Volk). These he links overtly to “general and political contexts.”75 In the first phase, consciousness of music was limited to the theories, techniques, and genres required to serve religion. Composers did not require a “higher erudition, a justification [of their work] before the free World Spirit.”76 In the next phase, musicians became aware of the sensual qualities of what they were doing, with the result that music served the increasingly refined needs of aristocratic patrons: “in place of the beautiful and true, the unusual appeared.”77 This is the age of virtuosity and entertainment. Finally, as humanity achieved more political freedom, a third age emerged in which musical artists turned inward in their creations to a deeper spirit and outward to a wider public of free citizens who gathered together in new institutions to make and experience music collectively. For Marx the bearer of this new spirit was Prussia, the German nation that, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the ups and downs of the Napoleonic Wars, was then emerging as the leading power in non-­Austrian Germany.78 In addition to its specifically Hegelian components, Marx’s dia­ lectical music history reflected a new consensus in German historical writ­­ ing. The cosmopolitanism Forkel found in Schlötzer’s worldhistory had given way to a progressive narrative model that would soon harden into Historismus and what Applegate calls “the nation-­making project of German cultural exploration.”79

A. B. Marx’s China More than a decade after the closure of the BAMZ, Marx turned to China in an article for Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-­Lexicon der Tonkunst, which was published in stages from 1835 to 1838; the volume this article appears in, the second, came out in 1835.80 The entry is much shorter than Forkel’s review—­it runs to only six pages—­and depends primarily on secondary literature derived from Amiot.81 It is strikingly polemic throughout. Marx opens with the suggestion that it would be wrong to dismiss Chinese music. On the contrary, it can “absolutely have artistic meaning for us [Europeans].” His readers ought even to find grounds for “more serious interest.” Indeed, an effort to find the “basis and beginning of all things” leads to China, because “here and nowhere else do we find the beginning of musical art.” China is the place “where the human spirit brought the syllables and sounds of nature,

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[which had been] up until then capricious [unstete] expressions of unconscious instinct, into a rational order, retained and used for rational and artistic purposes.”82 For more than four thousand years music in China has been an object of state policy; for almost three thousand years the Chinese had had a written system. After making an unfavorable comparison with Indian claims to musical antiquity (which he thinks are unreliable), Marx reports that contemporary Chinese prefer the music of their past to that of their present. It is particularly striking, he reports, how much more the Chinese know about their ancient music than the Europeans know about the Greeks. Indeed, Marx advises deep sympathy for the ancient Chinese spirit, which “thousands of years ago on the shore of a distant eastern sea sought, examined, and attempted to understand itself in the murmur of the Yellow River, in the magic flutes [Zauberflöten] of nature, and the wisdom of its living language.”83 Marx’s position sounds cosmopolitan. At this point in history nothing separates the Chinese from the Germans, who still do the same “in our groves, in the organ sounds of our cathedrals and the soul words of our language.”84 But “these beginnings have not led anywhere. . . . [T]he Chinese [person] has remained stationary where he stood millennia ago.”85 That is to say, the early Chinese and the early Germans both celebrated their respective national identities in sound worlds that directly reflect their natural environments (“murmurs of the Yellow River” / “groves”), their religion (“cathedrals”), and the special qualities of their language (“soul words”). For Marx, this is the turning point from cosmopolitanism to what Jürgen Osterhammel would call “exclusive Eurocentrism.” Whereas Forkel re­­ mained ambivalent about the value of Chinese music, in Marx’s reading it was finally beyond redemption. This can be accounted for by Marx’s He­­ gelian understanding of how history works. Chinese music lost its way, Marx argued, because it did not undergo the same dialectical process music experienced in Europe. The Chinese were unable to reach a new musical stage beyond the mystical union of sound and identity they shared with early Germans. They remain trapped outside history in the religious stage he describes in the fourth volume of the BAMZ.86 Another undercurrent is evident in Marx’s analysis of Chinese music. As August Sheehy has argued, Marx’s particular notion of musical progress, as evident both in music’s outward forms and in its inner processes, seems to have been shaped profoundly by his own experience as a Jewish convert to Protestantism in Vormärz Prussia.87 Marx framed China’s place in music history much as he imagined Jewish history to relate to Western history. In

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both cases history moved “from east to west.”88 Except that, unlike the Chinese, Marx, son of an enlightened, even Voltairean, Jewish father who had studied medicine at the University of  Halle but nonetheless never converted to Christianity, was willing to move in this direction himself, leaving his family’s faith behind. As Sheehy puts it, this personal movement “from East to West” was in many ways constitutive of Marx’s musical thought. “Mapping sonata form onto the stage of history,” Sheehy writes, “one could say that Marx lived during the Gang—­or, more specifically Durcharbeitung—­ of German-­Jewish relations that demanded continuation and resolution of the German and Jewish subjects that had gone into it, and which could be reconciled in the German state.”89 Marx sought personal assimilation or, to put it in properly Hegelian terms, Aufhebung (reconciliation within the dialectic) in the new Germany. The Chinese musicians of his imagination, refusing in their approach to musical materials to be agents of historical movement, did no such thing. Thus to Marx Chinese music is both familiar and strange. Marx argues, indeed, that the material basis of Chinese music—­the pentatonic scale—­ was readily available in the West. A reader could experience something like Chinese music simply by sitting at the piano and playing the “simple melodies” of the Scots, the European people whose culture was celebrated in the early nineteenth century as the most authentic and primitive.90 The emphasis on sonic experience matters. In one sense Marx’s observation retraces the “twin styles” debate between supporters of  “event-­oriented” Italian opera and “text-­oriented” German instrumental music.91 But there are also overtones of a more classical Orientalism. Although he never makes this point entirely explicit, Marx distrusts Chinese music because its materials—­how it sounds—­seem too easy, too feminine (playing a folksong at the piano would be a female pursuit in Marx’s book), and too “luxurious.” Indeed, the sound of  “oriental” music, Marx explains a little later, is too “colorful.” Marx’s move toward Scotland begins with the positive suggestion that experiencing simple pentatonic songs in arrangements at the piano might en­­ hance European sympathy for a faraway music. But, dialectically, he also signals to readers that such “limited” musics—­local and distant “others” to an emerging “art music”—­must inevitably fail the test of music history. Despite any appearance of sympathy for the Chinese, Marx’s construction of how music history works is shot through with such Orientalism from the start, an Orientalism that was likely inflected by his own experience as a convert from “oriental”  Judaism to “occidental” Protestantism.

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Marx’s sympathy for Chinese music decreases as the entry continues. After noting its supposed Celtic affinities, Marx briefly summarizes the mythical origins of music in Chinese culture from birdsong, before explain­ ing with the help of a table Chinese music theory’s cosmological basis, for instance, the correspondence of the twelve lü with the twelve lunar months.92 There follows a short description of Chinese musical notation. He ob­­serves again that scale examples given by Amiot—­the pentatonic row f-­g-­a-­b-­ d-­f—­correspond precisely to the Scots equivalent. But again, sonic experi­ ence matters: “The more excitable northern Europeans,” he continues, “man­­ aged to find a more soulful swing [Schwung] and powerful rhythm” for it. He then describes later pentatonic scales built on different pitches, noting that the Chinese “date the decline of their music to the time when musicians ceased to be loyal to the old scales.”93 He ends his discussion with a summary of the types of Chinese instruments, observing that “deep thought” must have gone into creating a system with so many opportunities to experiment with tone color. Just at this (promising) juncture Marx cuts off the discussion. “It is not important,” he writes, “to consider details of the Chinese orchestra further, since in the main the key contribution of the Chinese in the area of musical art is the invention and safekeeping of their musical system. Their instruments sound together or one after another, in part only to provide the fullness of sound that the Chinese, like all the peoples of the colorful Orient, require in part on mystical-­religious grounds, or simply ceremonial ones.”94 He concludes that “further information about present musical practices in China is of interest not to music history but at most to the study of folklore.”95 Here is Marx’s direct reflection of Hegel’s most notorious pronouncement on China. According to the philosopher, China lay “outside the World’s History . . . everything that belongs to Spirit—­unconstrained morality in practice and theory, heart, inward religion, Science and Art properly so-­called—­is alien to it.”96 Marx’s Hegelianism—­obvious in the dialectical back-­and-­forth between sympathy for and condemnation of Chinese music in the text itself—­works on both historical and analytical levels. The same spirit that reveals itself in the progress of music history does so in the dynamism—­the push and pull between Satz and Gang, as Nicholas Mathew observes of  Marx’s approach to musical form—­of a Beethoven sonata.97 China plays a central role in Marx’s theory of global music history because it was first in China “that the sounds of nature were brought into a rational order, retained, used for

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rational and artistic purposes.”98 Marx’s reading here is not too far from Forkel’s, which also assigned China pride of place in the development of rational musical systems. But what happens next distinguishes the two historical accounts. In an application of Hegel’s famous idea of the “cunning of reason,” Marx imagines that the World Spirit of music “chose” the Chinese as a vehicle for the inauguration of literate music history.99 Yet over the long term the Chinese could not develop a sophisticated understanding of music because their musical materials, unsuited to harmony and counter­ point, were not sufficient to allow further progress. In other words, Chinese musical culture did not allow the Chinese to express their inner nature individually, free from the external dictates that rule the “childlike” religious phase of music history. Neither they nor their music were truly autonomous. The power of individual subjects to act free of outer constraints, whether religious or sensual (in other words, autonomy), is the key aspiration of German philosophy from Kant onward. It is likewise a central element of the emerging doctrine of the “autonomous” musical artwork.100 A music—­Italian opera, Scots folksong, or the “colorfully” orchestrated music of China—­that depends entirely on how it sounds to have an effect cannot foster this kind of freedom.

Germany’s Music, Chinese Futures Forkel’s plagiarized story about Chinese music satirized contemporary German conditions. Working under cosmopolitan assumptions and not yet constrained by binaries of European self and Chinese other, he used a Chinese imaginary to illuminate perspectives for a new musical Germany. Marx’s ap­­ proach to China, by contrast, depended on a strict division between West and East. This division in turn allowed for a new political formation, the German nation, to assume the mantle of Europe’s cultural leaders. His ac­­ count of China’s abandonment by the World Spirit of music history—­ inflected privately, perhaps, by his own lived experience as a (former) member of an “oriental” people, the Jews, that he felt had likewise been left behind by the Gang of history—­has had remarkable staying power. It bears deep similarities to many answers to the often-­repeated question of why China, for all its economic strength, failed to develop along Western lines into an “advanced” industrial society. In the course of the twentieth century many Chinese adopted Marx’s music-­historical position as their own. The early twentieth-­century educator Cai Yuanpei, who, after training in Leipzig, served as the first president of Peking University and played a leading role

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in founding the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, wrote a short poem expressing this: Our nation’s music is too plain Westerners are surprised to hear. I love Beethoven’s music, Which embodies deep and broad aspirations.101

Scott Burnham has written—­somewhat nostalgically—­that “our continued acceptance in the musico-­aesthetic marketplace of such defunct philosophical currency [as Marx’s] is an indication that such currency still buys us something of value, something no longer dreamt of in our philosophy.”102 Much has been bought with the coin of German musical idealism, but in music as in other fields there was a significant cost. Burnham’s observation is a warning about the continuing power of a fantasy—­Germany as the nation where music found true philosophical freedom—­that one might assume has long since lost its normative power. It seems fair to ask how much value is left in any “defunct philosophical currency,” especially when its circulation seems to have closed off engagement with much of the world. A key denomination in such currency is the narrative of historical progress somewhat implicit in Forkel and far more explicit in Marx. This attitude is neither harmless nor irrelevant to present concerns. Postcolonial critics consider this kind of historicism a way of saying “not yet” to the non-­ European world.103 Marx adapted Hegel’s well-­known dismissal of China into musical terms, perhaps all the more urgently because he felt an affinity between the tradition-­worshipping Chinese and the Jews of his childhood community in Halle. Indeed, overall his music-­historical apple did not fall far from Hegel’s philosophical tree. Susan Buck-­Morss has argued that key moments in Hegel’s thought were framed in global terms.104 Hegel’s staging of history and his reliance on spirit as history’s prime force “territorialized” philosophy and marked Europe as its main arena. As Buck-­Morss writes, Hegel’s philosophy of history placed “limits . . . on our historical imaginations” structured by “the boundary concepts of race, nation, and modern progress that were constructed in large part to close off historical alternatives.”105 By analogy, when Marx ruled China out of bounds for anyone but folklorists, he built a wall around it and closed off its music as an alternative field of study for all but the most enterprising music historians in the West for a century or more. Thinking about the world this way—­marking

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on its map borders of race and nation—­made imperial praxis easier, or indeed possible at all. Drawing on the Caribbean historians C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, Buck-­Morss outlines how Hegel, his outlook shaped by the mass enslavement of Africans by Westerners that began to be abolished only in his lifetime, forged crucial elements of his philosophy along racist lines.106 Williams famously argued that “slavery was not born of racism, rac­­ ism was born of slavery.” Hegel, Buck-­Morss claims, understood slavery to be a historical necessity and structured his view of European superiority accordingly. His racism followed. By extension, A. B. Marx’s erasure of China from world music history was not in itself a symptom of underlying previous racist attitudes toward the Chinese. Indeed, his apparent if dialectical sympathy for the musical “groves” of the ancient Chinese, and the echoes of his personal experience in their implicit similarity to the ancient Hebrews, suggests something more complex than simple racism. Yet overall Marx’s approach to the history of non-­Western musics unfolded in the shadow of Hegel’s analogy of a world history that moved from “east to west.” Such an analogy worked well at a historical moment when Europeans were looking for reasons to justify their imperial designs on the rest of the world and when their philosophers reassured them that this praxis was justified. This is what makes Hegelian thought, for all its pretensions to universality, “territorial.” In this sense the (musical) racism—­however complex and diffuse—­inherent in Marx’s treatment of Chinese music was a consequence of a Western imperial desire for China, which was reaching its first mature expression just at the moment when Marx wrote his assessment of Chinese music. By drawing a scholarly boundary between Western and Chinese music, Marx constructed a musically triumphant Europe, with Germany leading the way past peoples not suited to make the only right music of the future. To acknowledge this is to understand what the emergence of a specifically German musical imaginary, with all the exceptionalism it entails, means in a global context. Even if Prussia had no overseas colonies at the time, there can be no other word but racism for the division of the world into self and other, and into those with agency (“freedom”) and those without. In this respect the German “special path” in music and musical scholarship, its Sonderweg, was paved with racist bricks, laid down by Marx and others like him. One cornerstone of traditional understanding of the “exceptional” works of the German canon of  Western art music is the idea of  “freedom.” Those, such as A. B. Marx, who practice this kind of understanding find freedom in two linked processes. Works of music themselves enact narratives of free-

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dom through “heroic” formal plans derived from tonic-­dominant tensions and “organic” thematic development.107 “Primitive” or “oriental” musics, ac­­ cording to such critics, do not allow for such an unfolding of  “absolute” indi­­ vidual expressiveness made audible in musical form. Chinese music is ephemeral because it is “only” sound and not form. Marx’s writings set the tone for discourses of musical value in which German music that exhibits a particular “heroic” formal rhetoric and thematic development is preferred to all other kinds. As Sanna Pederson has written of Marx’s legacy, “the absence of non-­Germanic music in the realm of absolute music is hardly an accident.”108 In this context the Orientalism of Marx’s account of Chinese music history is hard to miss. The second process is the unfolding of history itself. In Hegel’s thought history overcomes conflicts and comes to “self-­identity” in a perfect future. In the realm of art, certain (Western) forms of expression, by virtue of their overcoming the conflict between form and content and thus also “coming to self-­identity,” achieve a place “outside” or “beyond” history.109 Proponents of the “heroes” of Western art music—­notably Beethoven, as Scott Burnham has shown—­are apt to frame their arguments in similar terms. Masterpieces point toward the future and are at the same time “incarnations” of the World Spirit of music history, “given” to humanity at moments and in places of necessity as timeless monuments.110 The “not yet” of  Western imperialism and the thought behind the incarnation and subsequent canon­ ization of masterpieces of  Western art music have something in common. A. B. Marx granted Chinese music the prestige of having expressed music history’s one true “idea” at an earlier stage in world music history, just as he would have admitted there could be no New Testament without the Old. But in his present, both its forms and its contents had lost their interest. Marx listened to Chinese music and, missing tonal structures and finding no great works, heard mere “folklore.”111 So he removed it from his music history. “Not yet” became “no longer.”

epi lo g u e

Sound and the Sino-­Western Encounter

T

Opera in the Contact Zone

he macartney embassy arrived in canton from beijing on December 19, 1793, after traveling through China for seventy-­two days, mostly on canals and rivers. Along the way its chroniclers—­Macartney, Staunton, Barrow, Anderson, and Hüttner (Holmes had traveled by ship along the coast with another group)—­gathered hundreds of pages of notes, sketches, and other materials. China’s soundscapes take a subordinate role in these. Perhaps the salvos and shrill wind music of the Qing military detachments lining riverbanks and bridges were now too familiar, as were the rhythmic songs of the boatmen who rowed and dragged their flotilla southward.1 Now and then Hüttner made out something new and interesting. In Suzhou, for example, he heard the soft sound of the pipa or lute coming from pleasure boats on the prosperous city’s famous canals. “Residents and visitors,” he reports, “pass much of their time in the small gondolas that can be seen in and around the city in great numbers.”  This was not without dan­­ ger: “It is said that many people lose their entire fortunes in short periods, and that merchants who come here to sell their wares are very often made into beggars through the pleasures of Suzhou’s gondolas.” In an allusion to the city’s reputation as a center of higher learning, their female crews were introduced to him as “students” of Suzhou’s “academy.” He explains: “In this country, as in all of Asia, lust is an academic subject and its students objects of commerce.”2 When the embassy arrived in Canton, Chinese officials housed its senior members in comfortable quarters requisitioned from hong merchants across the Pearl River from the foreign factories. There, visible and audible from the terrace where the members of the embassy took their meals, the authorities had erected a temporary theater. The performances were ordered

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by the imperial bureaucracy in Beijing as a special honor for the visitors. Following court practice, they began early in the morning and lasted long into the day. Barrow, who had not been at Jehol and thus had missed the elaborate operas produced for Qianlong’s birthday, did not care for what he heard. “On our arrival here,” he writes, “we found a company of comedians hard at work, in the middle of a piece, which it seemed had begun at sunrise.” The noise overpowered him. “[The] squalling and their shrill and harsh music were so dreadful,” he continues, “that [the authorities] were prevailed upon, with difficulty, to break off during dinner, which was served up in a viranda [sic] directly opposite the theatre.” At dawn the next morning the music started again, “but at the particular request of the Embassador, in which he was joined by the whole suite, they were discharged, to the no small astonishment of our Chinese conductors, who concluded . . . that the English had very little taste for elegant amusements.”3 Figure E.1 shows a drawing by William Alexander, the embassy’s draftsman, of a theatri­­ cal character (a “comedian”) taken from this performance. Alexander, who like Barrow had not been to Jehol, also found the music hard to take: “Sudden bursts, from the harshest wind instruments, and the sonorous gong, frequently stun the ears of the audience.”4 The story of this Chinese “intrusion” on the private soundscapes of visiting Britons was still in circulation four decades later. Charles Toogood Downing reports having heard that “his lordship begged as a particular favour that they would dispense with this disagreeable ceremony. The Chinese mandarins stared with astonishment at his singular taste, but upon his repeated entreaties withdrew the nuisance.”5 In his memoir Macartney tells this story in much the same way, but without dismissing Chinese musical theater entirely. Just hours after the embassy arrived in Canton, he recounts, “we . . . adjourned to the theatre, on which a company of comedians (who are reckoned capital performers, and had been ordered down from Nankin on purpose) were prepared to entertain us.”6 It was clear to Macartney that the staging of opera was meant as a great honor, part of the embassy’s positive reception by Canton’s new viceroy, who had accompanied the delegation on the journey from Beijing. “The Viceroy,” Macartney writes, “conducted the whole ceremony with the greatest dignity and propriety, distinguishing us by the most pointed marks of respect and regard.” The next morning Macartney—­who seems to have forgotten his 8:00 a.m. trip to the opera in Jehol—­reports that he woke up “to see the comedy already begun and the actors performing in full dress, for it seems that this was not a rehearsal, but one of their formal pieces.”

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fig u re e.1   William Alexander, “Comedian,” 1793. British Library, London.

He made inquiries and learned “that whenever the Chinese mean to entertain their friends with particular distinction, an indispensable article is a comedy, or rather a string of comedies which are acted one after the other without intermission for several hours together.”7 Macartney, after four months as a high-­ranking guest of the Chinese emperor, had (finally) begun to make sense of the Qing guest ritual’s sonic and theatrical dimensions. Even so, he asked for the performances to be stopped. “I shall endeavour to have them [the performers] relieved,” he wrote in his

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diary, “if  I can do it without giving offence to the taste of the nation or having my own called into question.” He explains himself with a cultural reversal: In case His Imperial Majesty Qianlong should send Ambassadors to the Court of Great Britain, there would be something comical, according to our manners, if my Lord Chamberlain Salisbury were to issue an order to Messrs. Harris and Sheridan, the King’s patentees, to exhibit Messrs. Lewis and Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, and Miss Farron during several days, or rather nights together, for the entertainment of their Chinese Excellencies. I am afraid they would at first feel the powers of the great buttresses of Drury Lane and Covent Garden as little affecting to them as the exertions of these capital actors from Nanking have been to us.8

Macartney understood that prominent London theater companies such as those of Harris and Sheridan (“the King’s patentees”) had much the same relationship with political power as did the prestigious Nanjing companies. He recognized a parallel structure, but eventually his deciding to have the music across from his quarters stopped suggests that he considered European and Chinese theater irreconcilable; given the remarks of his companions, it seems that Chinese theater’s noisiness was the sticking point. At least he grants Chinese listeners the right to reject European theater “at first.” This qualification suggests that the two sides might in time come to understand each other in this medium. Hüttner’s account of the opera on the banks of the Pearl River is entirely positive. In his memoir he writes that the embassy was “astounded by the excellent production of a company from Nanjing” and that they were “surprised by an opera that included not only very natural recitatives but also very expressive arias, sung in the right tempo throughout and accompanied with appropriate instrumental music.”9 Charles Burney, in his article on Chinese music for Rees’s Cyclopaedia, relates Hüttner’s enthusiasm for the performances. “Though entirely ignorant of the Chinese language,” members of the embassy were nonetheless able to follow the action, “entirely owing to the excellent imitation of the different accents of the passions, and to their adequate movements and gestures.”10 Hüttner was not the only Euro­ pean in the eighteenth century to profess admiration for Chinese theater. As we saw in chapter 1, in imperial Beijing Joseph Amiot found echoes of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s enthusiasm for genres of musical theater that join song, instrumental music, and gestures to “imitate the passions.” This

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universalist perspective was evidently alive and well in Hüttner’s listening, thirty years after Gluck and Calzabigi’s manifesto.11 Four decades after Macartney, positive comparisons of Chinese and Western musical theater were still available. John Francis Davis (1795–­1890), later the first British governor of Hong Kong, began working at the English fac­­ tory in Canton in 1813. Alongside his commercial and political work, Davis—­ one of the few Europeans of his generation to master the Chinese lan­­ guage—­was a pioneer of early British sinology. His academic and belletris­­ tic contributions included widely read accounts and translations of Chinese literature and several general surveys of Chinese history and culture.12 In his widely read The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants (1836), he devotes a long passage to a discussion of Chinese theater. He begins with an account of the arrival of a “party of Italian opera singers” consisting of five men and two women in Macao in 1833. The troupe was traveling from South America, where it had appeared to great acclaim, to Calcutta, “a likewise profitable field.”13 At Macao it “met with inducements to remain some six months” before continuing to India; the European community, which included traders from nearby Canton, arranged for the construction (in the Chinese fashion) of a temporary theater, where the Italians performed “most of Rossini’s operas with great success.”14 Davis reports that the Chinese of Macao—­and presumably wealthy hong merchants from Canton—­were surprised to find a theater “erected by the foreigners on the shores of the celestial empire, and in that very shape, too, which most nearly resembles their own performances, a mixture of song and recitative.”15 The notion that a Chinese observer might find Western musical theater congenial appears elsewhere in Davis’s work. In The Poetry of the Chinese (1830) Davis offers the translation of a poetic description of London by an anonymous Chinese who supposedly visited the British capital in 1813. One stanza is about British theater. It begins with a reference to the time of day: Their theatres are closed during the long days; It is after dark that the painted scenes are displayed: The faces of the actors are handsome to behold, And their dresses are composed of silk and satin: Their voices resound in unison with stringed and wind instruments And they dance to the inspiring note of drums and flutes: It constitutes the perfection of harmonious delight, Every one retires with a smiling countenance.16

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Peter Kitson suspects that this “translation” might actually be an original work by Davis himself.17 What matters for our purposes is the observation that theater in London “constitutes the perfection of harmonious delight.” Like Hüttner (and Amiot before him), the author of these lines—­it does not matter whether it was Davis or an actual Chinese theatergoer—­valued “harmony” between action, voice, and music. Such conceptual harmony builds a bridge between Chinese and Western concepts of musical theater. Davis’s discussion of Chinese music, however, is perfunctory. It consists mainly of a quotation from Staunton, which Davis attributes instead to Hüttner. This comes as no surprise, since Davis, an insider who knew George Thomas Staunton well, would have known that Staunton senior had depended heavily on Hüttner in writing his account of the Macartney Embassy.18 Davis is not charitable about Chinese music as a stand-­alone art form, but he emphasizes China’s national enthusiasm for it. “Many of the Chinese have a ready ear for music,” he writes, “though accompanied by such a bad national taste.” Davis knew this from experience. During the off-­season in Macao he once played a Chinese associate’s own music back to him on a piano. “The magistrate of the Macao district was on a visit to the writer of this,” Davis writes, “when the piano being touched with a Chinese air, of which the music is given in Barrow’s Travels, he immediately turned with a look of pleased surprise and named the tune.”19 Davis’s section was the Peyho boatmen’s song, which had traveled via Barrow’s transcription to London and then back to Macao. For all the relative openness of listeners such as Davis, Hüttner, and Macartney before him, it is Barrow’s condemnation that may have become the one historians remember. A. B. Marx, reading through the archive of Western experiences of Chinese music just a few years later, certainly found little to convince him that Chinese music was more than folklorist noise. Nevertheless, from Amiot to Macartney to Hüttner to Davis there appears to have been acceptance of the idea that Chinese and European musical theater worked through sound in comparable ways. Barrow’s approach to proto-­ethnographic method—­he transcribed the Peyho boatmen’s song as an isolated object, not as a piece of living music—­had predisposed him to reject commonalities between Western and Chinese listening. Until the end of the Canton System Westerners accepted theatrical musicking as an integral element of China’s soundscapes, even if they often misunderstood and sometimes disliked it. Westerners experienced diverse Chinese narrative and theatrical genres, all sung. The intimate performances of repertoires such as the narrative songs of courtesans that James Lind

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witnessed in Canton in the 1760s mark one end of this spectrum. The elab­ orate public productions of formal opera at the summer palace in Jehol—­ vehicles of grand political representation, inalienable from the diplomatic formalities of the guest ritual—­mark the other.  The theatrical performances put on by hong merchants for prominent guests, the village theatrical Downing barged in on, and the street performances Neumann heard behind the factories are stations in between. As individuals—­with the exception perhaps of Davis—­none of these earwitnesses were able to form a comprehensive impression of Chinese theater, which recent research has shown often mixed public and private elements. But the archive of their reports that this book has made visible offers a Western window on a wide panorama of Chinese theatrical practices around 1800.20 A more systematic approach to Western experiences of Chinese theater before the Opium Wars than I have offered here, one that analyzes both individual sources such as the textbook Lind sent to Burney and more comprehensive collections such as Davis’s library in Canton (should it be recoverable), would take this story further.

What Imperialism Sounds Like On Christmas Day 1793 the resident officials of the East India Company, along with the captains of British ships, entertained the gentlemen of the Macartney Embassy at the British factory. The next day the embassy left for Macao and from there for home. Five comrades did not make this final journey: the embassy’s band. Its members, according to Anderson, left the service of the embassy and “entered in to that of the English factory.” Anderson confirms that the company’s men in Canton drew little pleasure from the music on offer all around them. The band, he writes, would be “a very valuable acquisition in a country and situation where so little exterior amusement of any kind is to be obtained.”21 The band’s members seem not to have made much of an impression on the historical record in their new home. Their supposed engagement by the factory is not recorded in the company’s official accounts, and reports of further musical activities have yet to appear in the archive of the China trade.22 Perhaps its members had made a private arrangement with the gentlemen of the factory. It is possi­ ble that some soon took advantage of other opportunities for personal en­ richment or were carried off by disease. In any case the sounds they made, brought all the way from London to add an extra dimension to Macartney’s brief attempt at grand representation in his temporary palace in Beijing, were soon lost in the fog of history.

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The failure of the Macartney Embassy was one reason, if not the only one, for the breakdown of Sino-­British relations in the late 1830s. After Macartney returned to Britain, the “country trade” of independent shipping from India—­which his superiors in London had wanted to protect by getting the Chinese to recognize it—­continued to flourish. Its main commodity—­ opium—­was forbidden in China, but in practice its consumption on an ever-­wider scale was enabled by Westerners’ increasing toleration in the name of “free trade.”23 At the cost of misery and addiction for millions of Chinese, the opium trade allowed the more efficient circulation of capital in the nascent British Empire. For instance, profits in Bengal were reinvested in opium exports to Canton, where the exporters realized astronomical profits. These profits were shared with investors in British India, but also with the East India Company in Canton. Against the silver advanced by opium traders, the company issued letters of credit that could be redeemed in London. Thus the company finally solved the problem that had haunted it for more than a century: how to organize enough silver specie to pay for the official trade in commodities like tea. No longer did the West’s thirst for Chinese commodities generate a massive currency deficit. The trade in illegal drugs, carried on in the open by Western traders in Canton, generated all the silver needed, with the added bonus that the British money in India could be “transferred” back to London via the opium trade in Canton.24 The consequences were severe: social breakdown, massive corruption, and dilution of the power of China’s central government. In 1834 the British Parliament declined to renew the East India Company’s monopoly on trade in the East. The effect was to accelerate the opium trade in Canton, now carried on by individual private firms such as Dent and Company, whose founder, Lancelot Dent, had hosted the German sinologist and keen listener Karl Friedrich Neumann in Canton in 1830. Sino-­British relations deteriorated. In 1839 the British prime minister Lord Palmerston sent the Scots peer and naval hero Lord John Napier to Can­­ ton to take up the new post of chief superintendent of trade (with John Fran­­ cis Davis as deputy). Napier failed to achieve any liberalization of trade and soon fell into dispute with the Canton authorities, who flatly refused to recognize his standing as a diplomat or to deal with him in person. In late September Napier—­sick with typhus—­was forced by the Chinese to leave for Macao under military escort. Napier and his party had to wait several days between the two cities (on a journey that usually took about eight hours). Apparently the Chinese forces who accompanied them had been instructed to use noise as a tool of political intimidation. “We were detained here from

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the time of anchoring the boats on the 23d, until 1 p.m. of the 25th,” one of Napier’s staff reported, “amidst noise, confusion, and beating of gongs, such that his Lordship could barely support.”25 The editors of the Canton Repos­ itory later suggested that the noise hastened Napier’s death on October 11: “The sufferings that his Lordship had to endure,” they wrote, “confined as he was in a passage-­boat, amidst the noise of gongs and crackers, the firing of salutes, and personal insults from the people, which were continued in despite of repeated remonstrances, caused a relapse of fever, and hastened him to the grave.”26 Napier’s burial in Macao with full military honors was a sonic affair involving Portuguese and British soldiers firing multiple salutes. If at first only in ceremony, Westerners were firing back.27 In 1839 the central government in Beijing took decisive action. It appointed a new commissioner for Canton, Lin Zexu. Lin took robust steps to stop the opium trade by confiscating all the opium he could get his hands on, starting with Dent’s. In response the British started using force to resolve routine disagreements between Chinese and foreigners, many not related to opium, that would previously have been addressed in complex negotiations. Palmerston sent an armed expedition, which arrived in late summer 1840. In the winter of 1840–­41, during what had been the normal trading season for more than a century, British forces began an attack on China.28 Their steam-­powered warships, which could travel up and down the Pearl River regardless of wind, brought entirely new sounds to the Sino-­Western encounter. On January 7, 1841, British and Chinese forces met in one of the first major engagements of the First Opium War. HMS Nemesis, a steamship, used a Congreve rocket to attack a Chinese war junk. “The smoke and flame and thunder of the explosion,” one observer wrote, “with the broken fragments falling round, and even portions of dissevered bodies scattering as they fell, were enough to strike with awe, if not with fear, the stoutest heart that looked upon it.”29 Western listeners in Canton knew the sound of rockets well from their peaceful use, for instance to announce the beginning of theatrical performances at festivals along the river. The sound of the Canton System’s end, however, was the screaming of British ordnance and the splash of dismembered Chinese bodies hitting the Pearl River.

Imperial Listening and the “Puzzle” of China In this book I have outlined slow and fitful changes in Western attitudes toward Chinese sounds in the decades around 1800. A century earlier, West­

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erners such as Christian Wolff and Jean-­Philippe Rameau imagined that Europeans and Chinese shared a common sense of hearing. Wolff even believed that what the Chinese heard might explain China’s moral superiority. Rameau, after reading manuscript reports about Chinese music compiled in Beijing by Joseph Amiot, imagined that China and the West musicked according to the same natural law of sounding bodies, the corps sonore. Amiot, in response, reconfigured the Chinese concept of harmony. He explained to his readers in the West that Chinese music, for all the “simplicity” of its surface, was imbued with a metaphorical richness because it mirrored all the “harmonies” of the natural world. He created a space in which Rameau’s musical thought and China’s sonic metaphysics could exist in concert. To recognize this is to recognize that the spatial frame of the history of Western art music is potentially much wider than usually ac­­ knowledged: Rameau’s dialogue with Amiot gives a global context to Rameau’s consolidation of practices of functional harmony. This perspective is not the only one that can explain this chapter of European music history, but acknowledging it presents the question of why exclusively Western perspectives should be privileged over all others. Any moment of confluence proved fragile: around 1800 Western attitudes began to shift. Chinese sounds, instead of representing an “absolute limit” to a shared universal sense of the audible, became for some influential listeners something “other.”  Western listeners in China (and those who imagined Chinese sounds in the West) responded to China’s soundscapes along a continuum from interest and attraction to indifference and disgust. As Sino-­Western relations deteriorated, typical reactions moved toward the negative. Compare the relative openness shown by James Lind and Matthew Raper, who actively sought to experience Chinese music, with Charles Too­­ good Downing’s hostility. All three were typical of Western listeners who left records of China’s sounds. They were all professionals whose sojourns in China were made possible by the China trade. The difference between their attitudes corresponds to a hardening of opinions about the innate superiority of the West in all areas, not only matters of sound and listening, expressed in terms of China’s “immutable” entrapment in an “earlier” time. Lind, for instance, seemed perplexed at Burney’s insistent queries about semitones. In response he shared Chinese musical materials without commenting on their quality and seems to have experienced the narrative genre naamyam without regarding it as necessarily being “from another time.” Likewise Raper was happy to make music in a Chinese band. Downing and listeners like him explicitly compared the soundscapes of Canton

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to the rough sonic environment of London. They heard the sonic tableau of the streets behind the factories as they would have looked at a Hogarth drawing of noisy London beggars.30  Their “imperial ears” heard differences of nation and ethnic origin and tied these to class and distinction. In a sense, in China’s otherness such Westerners heard a part of themselves from which they wanted to gain distance. In a similar spirit they edited aspects of their own musical traditions out of their Chinese soundscapes—­for instance, the songs and other sounds of Canton’s considerable population of Western laborers, the sailors at Whampoa. And they paid no attention at all to the rich sonic environment of the port city’s diverse maritime community, which included people from all around the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and sometimes even farther away. The members of the Macartney Embassy heard China along a similar spectrum of reactions. John Christian Hüttner, a German man of letters attached to the embassy as the private tutor to the son of Macartney’s dep­­ uty, compared the music he heard at their introduction to the emperor to the sublimity of Handel and recognized in Chinese opera a successful mix of music, gesture, and drama. Yet his colleague John Barrow heard the same imperial music Hüttner did when the emperor met the embassy on the road to Yuanmingyuan and had nothing but scorn for its supposed Old Testament grandeur. The German sinologist Karl Friedrich Neumann heard China more positively, delighting even in the songs of Macao’s itinerant beggars. Neumann and Hüttner were open to China, which they attempted to experience sonically from the “inside.” By the 1830s, as Britain’s imperial ambitions cast lengthening shadows, there were precious few Neumanns left in China. The dominant Western perspective on Chinese sounds had moved, in concert with perspectives on all things Chinese, from openness to dismissal. Back in Europe, Charles Burney worked on the problem of Chinese music for decades, from the early 1770s until the first years of the new century. Burney began with curiosity about China and drew explicitly on the discussions of Chinese music he encountered in 1770s France, which were in turn fostered in networks stretching all the way to Beijing itself. Unlike Roussier, however, he was not interested in arguing that Chinese music flowed from an ancient Egyptian source. Instead, he drew on his understanding of Rameau’s thesis that Chinese knowledge of the triple progression demon­ strated the universality of functional harmony to launch a decades-­long program of inquiry into Chinese musical practice. His goal was to discover whether the way the Chinese actually made music conformed to this uni-

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versal theory. If it did, then the Chinese would have to “know semitones,” because semitones are the building blocks of functional harmony. The use of a twelve-­note “complete” scale was the mark of progress, and modulation was the musical technology of the future. His diligent attempts to discover whether the Chinese “had” this technology led to his building a special ma­­ chine, the mechanical organ Macartney brought to Beijing, meant to establish once and for all where the Chinese stood on his putative timeline of world music history. The organ failed to impress its intended listeners and was sold as surplus to requirements when the embassy reached Canton on its way home. Burney’s conclusion—­presented with an element of self-­doubt—­was that the Chinese stubbornly rejected Western harmony’s “concord of sweet sounds” and the differentiation and variety that Burney believed harmony allowed. But Burney expressly rejected the idea that some music was so superior to others as to be timeless, deserving preservation in what today is called the “canon of musical works.” Chinese music, he believed, had another problem. It was not subject enough to the hurly-­burly of the market of musical public opinion—­here one truly senses the proximity of his thought to that of his contemporary Adam Smith—­and therefore was fa­­ tally “stuck.” Yet when discussing Chinese reactions to the mechanical organ Burney wondered fleetingly if Rousseau might have been right after all about the negative effect of harmony and counterpoint on musical expression. Burney’s moment of hesitation reveals traces in his thought of a discourse opposed to the rise of counterpoint and harmony as indexes of westernized modernity and progress and to the fall of China from exemplar to object of pity. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Burney’s sometime competitor, did not commit as much intellectual effort to the study of China as Burney did. Instead he plagiarized the secondary literature in French, some of it drawn from Amiot. He brought these French texts together to make a “review” of Amiot’s writings, which it seems he may not have actually read. What is interesting is the way he shaped this material—­it does not matter where he got it—­to sharpen his own aesthetic perspective. The Chinese musicians he constructed embodied Western positions he wished to criticize. In Forkel’s telling they were “noble simplicity” fanatics, displaced followers of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Forkel placed his “review” of Amiot’s writings in an issue of his yearly musical almanac in which the only other long text is a celebration of the intricacies of a keyboard sonata by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. In the Bach essay, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s

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claim that good art is made by the right mix of simplicity and complexity frames Forkel’s praise of Bach’s sonata. A few dozen pages later, in Forkel’s discussion of Chinese music, the party of simplicity reappears in the garb of a learned mandarin. Thus Forkel globalized Lessing’s aesthetic perspective by making a real Chinese musician a preacher of musical Einfalt. Forkel drew China into a discussion now recognized as central to establishing consensus about what constitutes the great music of the “classical style.” Like Rameau’s theory of the corps sonore, Forkel’s well-­known canonization of this style, and its “predecessor” the ornate and contrapuntal music of  J. S. Bach, seems to have been formed in a partially global context. Adolph Bernhard Marx, finally, drew even harder conclusions. Unlike Burney and Forkel, he acquired his information on China from sources that were already decades old. Marx did not pursue deep intellectual engagement with Chinese music. He paid little attention to its details and did not consider that the meaning of Chinese music might be contested in China itself. Instead he passed critical judgment in the same manner he used when he dismissed other forms of music he did not approve of (Italian opera, for instance). He did, however, show sympathy for China’s place in a global music history. In fine dialectical style he valorized Chinese music as repre­ senting something older that had to be overcome. As I have argued here, this may have happened because Marx himself, a convert from Judaism, felt the same about his own heritage. This made Marx’s “China problem” similar to Burney’s: how to explain why, although China was the cradle of global musical civilization, the Chinese had failed to adopt progressive methods of making music. Marx’s answer was to dismiss four thousand years of Chinese music history as of no interest to anyone except folklorists. In the name of establishing a new (German) national perspective for music history, Marx used China, among other places, as a foil. To recognize this is to recognize that the ideology of a German “special path” in music—­to which Marx was a central contributor—­acquired at a key moment a partially Chinese backstory. Like all the Western listeners and thinkers whose voices have featured in this book, Marx had his sonic perspectives shaped by global concerns. Historians will recognize that the “problem” of China’s unwillingness to adopt Western music shares a similar structure with the “Needham puzzle,” named after the twentieth-­century British biochemist and historian Joseph Needham, whose monumental twenty-­seven-­volume account of the history of Chinese science and technology, Science and Civilisation in China, probably did more to advance Western understanding of China in this area than all previous work combined.31 Needham made it his life’s work to un-

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derstand why the Chinese did not develop something similar to Western experimental science around 1800, even though they were chronologically ahead of the West in so many areas of discovery.  The “Needham puzzle” in turn is similar to the question of the Chinese economy’s inability to adapt to new forms of Western pressure in the same era, a phenomenon known as the “great divergence.”32 Traditional explanations emphasize cultural dis­­ advantages: the absence of an all-­directing deity in Chinese religious prac­­ tices, for instance, or the preference for classical learning over “useful” knowledge. Some even suggest that the structure of the Chinese language and its primarily ideographic characters made it difficult for the Chinese to adapt Western technological innovations. Most recently Joel Mokyr has suggested that what the Chinese lacked most of all were “cultural entrepreneurs,” agents of change unafraid to challenge orthodox beliefs.33 It is striking that European analyses of Chinese music around 1800 made similar points. Forkel assumed that the Chinese were too wedded to old-­fashioned musical concepts and therefore unable to recognize the progressive potential in the music brought to their imperial court by European missionaries. Burney foreshadowed Mokyr in his emphasis on individual performers and composers as the kind of change makers evidently found only in Europe. Finally, Marx celebrated a particularly Western model of the composer as hero—­in Mokyr’s terms a “cultural entrepreneur”—­able to shape musical forms that themselves celebrate heroic narratives. Scott Burnham has called these instances of a particularly Beethoven-­like approach “aggrandizing metaphysics of self.”34 What Mokyr, Forkel, Burney, and Marx all have in common is that they judge China’s economy and music according to Western concepts like “entrepreneurship”—­and “tonality.” Recent work in Chinese and global history has changed the terms of the argument. Mark Elvin has proposed that around 1800 China found itself in a “high-­level equilibrium trap.” For centuries, he argues, the Chinese economy functioned well enough to absorb excess population, with the result that as population grew, labor costs and productivity fell. As a result of this stability China never experienced a rapid rise in productivity like the one taking place in Europe during the period covered by this book.35 The scholars of the “California school,” building on Elvin, go a step further and propose that China’s falling behind the West was entirely unrelated to Western “superiority.” As Francesca Bray writes, had things been even slightly different, “China could have continued to prosper, although the tra­­ jectories of growth and accumulation that it had established would have led in different directions from those of industrialising Europe.”36 The key

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to understanding what happened around 1800 to China’s economy—­and by extension its state polity and social structures—­R. Bin Wong argues, is to push the historical debate “beyond the limits of European experience.” Wong suggests a symmetrical comparison that judges each side without assuming a teleology toward a Western end.37 Transposing this debate to the domain of global music history would go beyond the remit of this book, but the story I have told of the formation of Western judgments about China might serve as a platform for further research and reflection. Much as Bray proposes to do with technology, one could “build on” technologies of sound, music, and listening “to explain historical change.”38 I have followed the advice of the historian Sebastian Conrad to look at perspectives together with processes. One process I trace is the divergence of sound and music. In the mid-­eighteenth century thinkers such as Rousseau took Chinese music seriously. In the early 1830s Western traders stuffed cotton in their ears to “protect” themselves from the loudness of the Chinese opera at banquets hosted by hong merchants. In many respects A. B. Marx did the same thing to Chinese music history. The traders in Canton and the Berlin music professor both acted in a way that made Chinese music into noise. They were silencing something that threatened their growing sense of power over China. Indeed, the sonic history of the Sino-­Western encounter in the decades around 1800 can be read as a hardening of  Western imperial desire to dominate China, in part because the economic conditions became more favorable to such desire. The (literal) blocking out of China’s music signals a new kind of thinking about “music,” under the sign of increased hegemonic ambition. To Western ears, it seems, Chinese music was no longer just another instance of a universal human activity. From now on “music” was something that they, as elite Westerners, owned exclusively and that empowered them to feel superior. The Chinese—­and Western sub­ alterns too—­were left to make do with “folklore.” Just as China became an object of new European economic and political empires, this “racialized music” became a sovereign subject of a new imperial music history.

From Postcolonialism to Deimperialization Thus the imperialization of Britain’s relationship with China coincided with an imperialization of Western musical thought. Adolph Bernhard Marx’s compressive dismissal of Chinese music is one example. There are others. Marx’s contemporary François-­Joseph Fétis, for instance, imagined tonality to be a defining characteristic of the racially superior West.39 Fétis conceived

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of the emergence of tonality as an organic historical process that functioned properly only where people were physically equipped to understand it. Racial difference, of exactly the kind Herder claimed existed between Chinese and Westerners (see chapter 1), underpinned the musical superiority of Europeans. This marks a change. For Rameau, tonality’s imagined universal writ was a benign enabler of East-­West dialogue. Amiot, a Frenchman in Beijing, presented Chinese music in terms designed to appeal to Europeans concerned with reform of their own musical theater. Even Rousseau, who in general had little time for China, imagined that Chinese music might be an echo of a universal golden age of musical simplicity. But for Fétis and thinkers like him, including Marx, this universality became a stick for beating the nontonal subjects of Europe’s new empires. Burney worked in this direction, to be sure, but it was left to others to take the final step and remove the Chinese from the conversation. This is a perspective. As a process, it was inseparable from the establishment of a canon of great works grouped around their allegiance to ideologies such as “absolute music.”40 The perspective that underpins the canon of great works was born, I would argue, of the same processes that made possible European imperialism in China. Here objects of political and intellectual history come together in a kind of feedback loop. Today Western music reigns as the sovereign subject of an influential kind of music history, even to the point of being attributed miraculous powers to make peace and alleviate poverty.41 In contemporary China, concertgoers, musicians, and parents ambitious for their children to succeed in a globalized world clamor for more exposure to the great works of Western art music. The study of this music has enjoyed explosive growth in Chinese higher education, perhaps because of the “modernity” such music is thought to represent. Yet the idea that Chinese music lacks modernity—­encapsulated by the widely heard contention in China itself that China “lacked a Beethoven”—­simply replicates Marx’s dismissal of it as “folklore” and echoes the wider reception of episodes in the history of empire: for example, the Macartney Embassy. This puts those who run musical institutions in today’s China in a difficult position. Of course Chinese music history and Chinese musical practice continue to enjoy preeminence in Chinese musical life. But they do so against the long shadow of the history of Western imperialism in China. The fabled “rise” of Western music in China will always be a reminder of China’s bitter past, despite the positive role that figures such as Beethoven, appropriated by Chinese progressives from the May Fourth Movement to Tiananmen Square, have played in modern Chinese history.42

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My project’s limited scope means that I have not been able to recover in any detail what Chinese imperial musicians thought of Macartney’s band when they visited his palace in September 1792. Nor, of course, have I been able to account for the complexity of China’s eventual adaptation of Western discourses, ideas, and technologies of sound. The point I wish to make is that the assumption that around 1800 the Chinese were unable to make anything of  Western music on cultural grounds (because China’s own musical culture was inert, bounded, and nonporous) not only was racist, it implicitly justified gunboat diplomacy. It also smothered, and continues to smother, historical curiosity. Surely there is a history to be written of the musical and sonic encounter between China and the West that does not treat both sides as immobile objects. Indeed, a history of Sino-­Western musicking from the early modern period onward could attend to colonialism and imperialism while also recognizing that Eurocentrism did not simply replace Sinocentrism. Instead, after the disasters of 1839–­42, Chinese listeners and musicians often forged new approaches that were neither entirely Western nor entirely Chinese. The efforts of the intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement of the republican period to frame Western musical objects such as Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or Beethoven’s piano sonatas in Chinese historical terms suggests that Chinese musical thinkers were ready to assimilate Western “others” into China-­centered frameworks.43 These are matters that ought to be pursued in further work. This book, focused exclusively on Western listening, has of necessity taken a narrower approach. I have argued that around 1800 Westerners used China to refashion their own sonic self-­awareness. Several decade later most of them had stopped listening to China. One result of this refashioning—­ which was, of course, also carried out using other foils near and far—­was the emergence of new discourses of  “great music” that only the West could have. A further result, closer to home, was division of the academic study and teaching of music into historical and ethnographic domains. Scott Burnham has called the thinking behind these attitudes—­for him ideas rooted in the idealism of thinkers such as A. B. Marx—­“defunct philosophical currency.”44 This currency still circulates in concert halls, conservatories, and university music departments. Its rate of exchange with the real specie of  Western im­perialism, and with its currently popular cousin imperial nostalgia, is one to one. To recognize this is to recognize the dimensions of the processes of deimperialization that still await historical musicology. Kuan-­Hsing Chen writes that deimperialization is what an “imperializing population” does in order to examine “the conduct, motives, desires,

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and consequences of the imperialist history that has informed its own subjectivity.” In the decades around 1800, Westerners began to stuff their ears with the metaphorical cotton of music-­historical imperialism. This book, I hope, has opened up a modest space ( joining efforts to understand sonic histories elsewhere on the globe) in which the work of deimperializing mu­ sicology might proceed. As Chen writes, “There can be no compromises in these exercises, if the world is to move ahead peacefully.”45 Writing of Hegel’s attention to Haiti just as Africa was excluded from the European “story,” Susan Buck-­Morss argues that “the point of returning to [this] historical moment . . . is less to condemn the German philosopher than to take a step in redeeming ourselves.”46 The analogy between Hegel’s Haiti and A. B. Marx’s China has been made clear in this book. Marx’s thought was the endpoint of the slow but recognizable exclusion of China from the European sonic imagination I have traced here. This narrowing of perspective cannot be separated from the real processes that led to the West’s “informal empire” in China. Perhaps in our case redemption is too strong a word. But historical decency demands that we open our ears a little wider in order hear what the history of our sonic encounter with China might be trying to tell us.

ac knowled gm e n ts

I

remember when i started this book. it was at a dinner at a Shanghai restaurant in Taipei in 2009. On my first trip to Taiwan (and to the Chinese-­speaking world, period), I had given a talk at the Graduate Institute of Musicology of National Taiwan University. Over dumplings I spoke with the GIM’s director, Ying-­fen Wang, a distinguished ethnomusicologist. I clearly remember her admonishing me that “what musicology really needs is a study of the soundscapes of the global eighteenth century.” Up to that point I had worked neither in sound studies nor in the global eighteenth century: in fact I was not sure I really understood either term. I decided to find out more. The following year, with a grant from the University of Southampton School of Humanities, I organized a workshop on soundscapes in the global eighteenth century at Chawton House Library. One of the speakers was Professor Wang’s colleague Jen-­yen Chen. Our conversations at the workshop and since have been invaluable. About the same time, David Clarke at the University of Hong Kong helped me find my first soundscape, that of Canton around 1800, first by mentioning it in an article in Early Music and then by meeting me just to chat at the Starbucks buried in the Hong Kong Cultural Center. He in turn introduced me to John Carroll of  HKU’s Department of History, who invited me to give a seminar in 2012. Without their enthusiasm I would never have gained the momentum I needed to write a book on this topic. John Carroll introduced me to Paul van Dyke, who patiently answered my layperson’s questions about the Canton system and shared his own extensive bibliography of European-­language primary sources on it. Without this resource I would never have been able to start this book.

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I am grateful to my audience at HKU and to further audiences at the Universities of Southampton, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, and Mainz, at Hanyang University in Seoul (where my generous host Kyung Young Chung also of­­ fered me valuable advice), Kings College London, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, National Taiwan University’s Depart­ ment of Philosophy, National Taiwan Normal University, Cornell University, and the University of Michigan. I gave papers based on the project at the Biennial Conference on Baroque Music and conferences of the North American British Music Studies Association, the Royal Musical Associa­ tion Music and Philosophy Study Group, the British Society for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, the East Asia Section of the International Musicological Society, the Taiwan Musicology Forum, and the American Musicological Society. Some were more successful than others: I am grateful to colleagues who pushed back against the simplistic assumptions with which I began my exploration of areas wholly new to me. In the early phase of a project, encouragement matters a lot. I thank Kofi Agawu for strengthening my resolve. In 2015 I was invited to speak at a one-­ day seminar at the Center for Global Processes at the University of Konstanz. My hosts there, Jürgen Osterhammel and Martin Rempe, created an inspiring and critical space for me and my fellow speakers Margaret Mehl and Harry Liebersohn; I cannot thank them, my other fellow speakers, and the members of the center enough for their critiques and enthusiasm. Jür­­ gen Osterhammel introduced me to Sabine Dabringhaus, who kindly shared some of her work with me. I started work on this book in earnest in the summer of 2013, with the help of a Re-­invitation Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Potsdam. I am grateful to Stefanie Stockhorst, my host there, and to the Gehlsen and Wulfing families in Berlin, who put me up for over a month in various apartments. In the academic year 2015–­16 I was awarded a Mid-­ Career Fellowship of the British Academy (MD 1400018) for this project, which was matched by a semester’s study leave from my own institution. These three semesters made all the difference. With funding from the British Academy and the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology I was able to take up a monthlong visiting fellowship at the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in November–­December 2015. My host there, Lap-­Kwan Kam, his brilliant students (particularly my research assistant, Yingcheng Lee), and Aimee Yang of the NCTU Office of International Affairs made me feel at home from

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the start. In my quiet office overlooking the campus baseball diamond, in their lively seminars, and (especially) over Taiwan beef noodles, Hsinchu style, this book began to assume definite shape. At the end of my stay Professor Kam and I hosted a study day titled “Sound and Listening in Sino-­ Western Perspective around 1800” with funding from the British Academy and MOST. Its participants, Emily Dolan, Jen-­yen Chen, Yuan-­zheng Yang, Hsien-­Chung Wang, and Jeng-­Guo Chen, and our audience gave me important impulses and laid the foundations, I hope, for more work together in the future. Wiebke Thormählen, another participant, has been putting up with my strange ideas since graduate school. I owe her more than she knows for sticking with me. I did a shocking amount of the archival research for this project from the comfort of my desk at home in Southampton and my office at NCTU (so thanks, Archive.org, Google Books, et al.). Nonetheless I am grateful for the help of librarians and archivists at the British Library (particularly Dr. Mar­­ garet Makepeace), the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (especially Dr. Ingrid Rückert), the Bodleian Library at Oxford Uni­­ versity, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the New York Public Library, and the Wason Collection at Cornell University. Dr. Patrick Connor of the Martyn Gregory Gallery in London generously shared visual materials with me and, more important, explained what they meant. The friendly staff of the University of Southampton Hartley Library interlibrary loan desk were always ready to help with my sometimes obscure requests. I have benefited immensely from conversations with past and present Southampton colleagues including Ben Piekut, Florian Scheding, Kate Guthrie, Jeanice Brooks, Valeria de Lucca, Mark Everist, Hettie Malcomson, Andrew Pinnock, Francesco Izzo, Danuta Mirka, Michael Finnissy, Andy Fisher, David Owen Norris, Helen Paul, Stephen Bygrave, Mary Orr, Stephanie Jones, and Neil Gregor. During the writing of this book I worked on a major collaborative project in global eighteenth-­century studies with Iwan-­Michelangelo D’Aprile, Stefanie Stockhorst, Catriona Seth, Daniel Roberts, Seema Alavi, and Tristan Coignard; our first efforts may have fallen victim to the Brexit referendum, but our conversations have shaped my work here in many ways. I owe a special debt to new friends in sinology and Chinese music studies who have welcomed me, a complete interloper, and displayed endless patience with my ignorance. They include Andres Rodrigues, Craig Clunas, Joseph Lam, Louise Zeitlin,  Joys Cheung, David Faure, Shu­ bing Jia, Chun-­zen Huang, Lester Hu, Wing Chung Ng, and Nancy Guy. In the past eight years I have gotten to know the Chinese-­speaking world

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primarily through trips in various administrative roles. On these I had ample opportunity to talk about my work with University of Southampton travel companions, nearly all scientists and engineers, including Peter Smith, Mark Spearing, Wendy Hall, Cheryl Metcalf, and especially Martin Charlton. Without these conversations in cafés, restaurants, hotel bars, and airport lounges this book would have been more boring and less accessible. My work in Taiwan would have been impossible without the tireless efforts and hos­ pitality of Alvin Su of National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. (Thanks for the coffee, the music, and showing me new ways to listen!) Finally, and most profoundly, I have learned much from generations of Southampton students, including many postgraduates from China. I would like especially to thank my present and former PhD supervisees Xin-­Ying Ch’ng, Chen­­ yin Tang, and Austin Glatthorn. Alex Rehding, David Irving, Austin Glatthorn, Mark Everist, and Gloria Levitas have all read parts of the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. Nathan Martin read and commented on the chapters relating to French music with forbearance and acumen. The University of Chicago Press’s two anonymous reviewers challenged me across my whole argument, much to my benefit. I thank the series editors James Davies and Nick Mathew for their critique and support. At the University of Chicago Press, my editor, Marta Tonegutti, and editorial associates Susannah Engstrom and Tristan Bates have been a pleasure to work with from start to finish. Alice Bennett’s copyediting was exemplary. Harley Mitford did sterling work on the index. Christine Schwab, the press’s production editor, calmly got this book, and the long project behind it, over the finish line. The errors and infelicities that remain are mine to answer for. I am grateful to the National Maritime Museum, the Trustees of the British Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Martyn Gregory Gallery for per­ mission to reproduce visual materials in their collections. Nicola Heinrich, a real musician, has shown endless patience for my long journey from violist to Mozart scholar to global historian of sound. No mat­­ ter what changes the journey brought, she always listened. Our children, Hannah, Emmy, and Bastian, have lived cheerfully with this project for what must feel like most of their lives, at times literally cheering me on. Without them and their mother I would never have finished.

not e s

Introduction 1.  In this book I refer to Europeans and North Americans of European origin as Western. 2.  Collection in the sense of  “gathering,” or Erfassung, a word I borrow from Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 11. 3.  Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment. 4.  Ong, Orality and Literacy; Schmidt, Hearing Things. 5.  Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin. 6.  See Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music; Bonds, Music as Thought; and Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. For a critique see Mathew, “Tangled Woof,” 133–­ 47, and Dolan, Orchestral Revolution, 5–­7. 7.  Barrow, Travels in China, 93. 8.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 1:216. 9.  Summed up by the positive Chinese word renao (“hot and noisy”) for crowded social spaces. See Chao, Miraculous Response, 147–­68. 10.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:297. 11.  I draw this distinction from Ochoa Gaultier, Aurality, 21. 12.  On Enlightenment constructions of “humanity” see in a wide literature Taylor, Sources of the Self, and Kondylis, Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. 13.  Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” 999. 14.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History”; Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, and Agnew, “Listening to Others”; Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe.” 15.  In a wide literature, see Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens; Kitson, Forging Romantic China; Honour, Chinoiserie; and Zuroski, Taste for China. 16.  Zuroski, Taste for China, 1. 17.  See Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, for a survey. 18.  Bickers, Scramble for China, 38. 19.  Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China. 20.  See chapter 4 below.

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21.  Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 60–­134. 22.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 23.  Said, Culture and Imperialism, 12. 24.  Quoted in Davies and Lockhart, “Introduction: Fantasies of  Total Description,” 1. 25.  I thank my colleague Mary Orr for suggesting this phrase. 26.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 15–­36. 27.  Ochoa Gaultier, Aurality, 9–­22 and 31–­76. 28.  Needham and Robinson, “Sound (Acoustics).” 29.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 77–­83. 30.  Pratt, 82–­83. 31.  Small, Musicking. 32.  For a flavor of this diversity see the essays in Pinch and Bijsterveld, Oxford Hand­­ book of Sound Studies. 33.  Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction.” On the “musical turn” see Müller, “Analysing Musical Culture.” 34.  Hunt, New Cultural History; Kerman, Contemplating Music. 35.  Gregor, “Why Does Music Matter?,” 114. 36.  Schafer, Tuning of the World. For a use of the term closer to my own intention here, see Picker, Victorian Soundscapes. 37.  Gordon, “What Mr. Jefferson Didn’t Hear,” 131. 38.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 39.  Corbin, Village Bells; Boutin, City of Noise. 40.  Examples include Leppert, Sight of Sound; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance; Schmidt, Hearing Things; the essays in Erlmann, Hearing Cultures; and Missfelder, “Period Ear.” 41.  Ochoa Gaultier, Aurality, 3. 42.  Ochoa Gaultier, 12. 43.  Ochoa Gaultier, 3. 44.  Ochoa Gaultier, 5. 45.  Said, Orientalism. 46.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History.” 47.  Bloechl, “Race, Empire, and Early Music”; Levitz, “Musicology beyond Borders?” 48.  Bickers, Scramble for China, 51–­57. 49.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 177–­7 8. 50.  Bloechl, Native American Song, 9. 51.  Bloechl, xv. 52.  Bellman, Exotic in Western Music; Head, Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart’s Turkish Music; Locke, Musical Exoticism. 53.  Locke, Musical Exoticism, 20. 54.  Locke, xv. 55.  The best surveys of Chinese history in English on the age of “informal empire” include Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History; Spence, Search  for Modern China; and Hsü, Rise of  Modern China. 56.  For an introduction see Mitter, Bitter Revolution, 155–­77.

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57.  For a discussion of how archives shape perspectives in imperial and colonial history see Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 58.  Chen,  Asia as Method, 1. 59.  Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 2. 60.  Aravamudan, 3. 61.  Lovell, Opium War. 62.  Lam, “Chinese Music and Its Globalized Past and Present.” 63.  Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music,” 61–­62. See also Joyce Lindorff, “Corelli’s Music in 18th-­Century China.” 64.  Osterhammel, “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik,” and Osterhammel, Transformation of the World; Conrad, What Is Global History? See also the essays in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History. 65.  Conrad, What Is Global History?, 11–­14. 66.  Conrad, 11; On the limits of claims to “globality” see Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History.” 67.  Conrad, What Is Global History?, 211. 68.  Conrad, 135–­40. 69.  For a survey of the emergence of these processes see Bickers, Scramble for China, 77–­112. 70.  The best treatment is Van Dyke, Canton Trade. 71.  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 6. 72.  Chakrabarty, 8. 73.  See Conrad’s discussion of Chakrabarty in What Is Global History?, 168–­70. 74.  See the excellent discussion in Porter, “Sinicizing Early Modernity,” 300–­301. 75.  Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar. 76.  For an example see Cai and Melvin, Beethoven in China. 77.  Quoted in Harris, Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia, 8. 78.  Cheung, “Riding the Wind with Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony”; Jones, Yellow Music. 79.  Lindorff, “Corelli’s Music in 18th-­Century China,” and Lindorff, “Missionaries, Keyboards and Musical Exchange.” 80.  Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music.” 81.  For critiques of this position see Elman, On Their Own Terms, and Wang, “Discovering Steam Power.” On overcoming the “failure narrative” see Mullaney, “Scientia Sinesis.” 82.  See Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 1–­28. 83.  Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China, and Cai and Melvin, Beethoven in China. 84.  Bohlman, “European Discovery of Music in the Islamic World.” 85.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 347–­49. David Gramit makes a version of this argument in Cultivating Music. 86.  Cook, “We Are All (Ethno)musicologists.” 87.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History.” 88.  See also Gramit, Cultivating Music, 1–­26.

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89.  Bloechl, Native American Song, 25. 90.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” 34–­43. 91.  Cook, “We Are All (Ethno)musicologists”; Born, “For a Relational Musicology.” 92.  Cook, “We Are All (Ethno)musicologists,” 50–­52. 93.  Born, “For a Relational Musicology,” 216–­19. 94.  In a postscript Cook admits that perhaps “music studies” would be the better term. Cook, “We Are All (Ethno)musicologists,” 70. 95.  Exceptions include the work of Joseph Lam, for instance, State Sacrifices and Music in Ming China. 96.  See the discussion in the previous section. 97.  RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/; accessed March 25, 2017. 98.  For a survey see Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 41–­63. 99.  This is a theme in several other key works by Tomlinson: “Vico’s Songs” and Sing­­ ing of the New World. 100.  For a survey see Williams, Constructing Musicology. 101.  For example, Hugo Riemann. See Rehding, Hugo Riemann. 102.  Levitz, “Introduction,” in “Musicology beyond Borders?,” 821–­25. Chapter One 1.  For a survey of recent thought see Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History.” 2.  Classic statements are McNeill, Rise of the West, and Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity. 3.  See the essays in Carey and Festa, Postcolonial Enlightenment. 4.  Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” 1006. 5.  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 6.  Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” 1007. 7.  See Conrad, What Is Global History?, and the essays in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History. 8.  A recent study of this process in music is Agnew, “Hearing Things.” 9.  Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” 1008. 10.  See Osterhammel, “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik,” and Cook, “Western Music as World Music.” 11.  Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus; Irving, Colonial Counterpoint. 12.  For an introduction to European reception of China see Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, and Osterhammel, China und die Weltgesellschaft. 13.  On the importance of the senses to the China trade see Bickers, Scramble for China, 39. 14.  For an overview see Standaert, Handbook of Christianity in China. A recent survey of scholarship is Mungello, “Reinterpreting the History of Christianity in China.” 15.  Mungello, Chinese Rites Controversy. 16.  Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. 17.  My argument here is in debt to the essays in Schings, Ganze Mensch, and the concluding chapters of Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens.

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18.  Needham and Robinson, “Sound (Acoustics).” On Chinese discoveries in the area of equal temperament see Elvin, “Some Reactions on the Use of  ‘Styles of Scientific Thinking,’ ” 89–­96. 19.  Small, Musicking. 20.  Taylor, “Importance of Herder.” 21.  Bohlman, “Johann Gottfried Herder.” 22.  Wolff, Rede über die praktische Philosophie der Chinesen. 23.  For background see Lee, “Anti-­Europa.” 24.  Lee, 72. 25.  See the section on Wolff in Martus, Aufklärung, 263–­75. 26.  Shantz, Introduction to German Pietism; Brecht and Deppermann, Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. 27.  Martus, Aufklärung, 268–­75; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 544–­52. 28.  Wolff, Rede über die praktische Philosophie der Chinesen, 65. 29.  Gottsched, Auszug aus des Herrn Bateaux schönen Künste, 36. Hinrichsen, “Hamburger Opernstreit.” 30.  Quoted in Lütteken, Monologische als Denkform in der Musik, 15. 31.  Lindner and Erk, Geschichte des deutschen Liedes ; Friedlaender, Das deutsche Lied; Leisinger, “Ode.” 32.  Lütteken, Monologische als Denkform in der Musik, 17–­19. 33.  For an introduction to questions of music and morality in eighteenth-­century Europe see Kutschke, Gemengelage, 24–­33. 34.  The most recent discussions of Rameau’s “non-­European” music are Klotz, “Tartini the Indian,” and the chapter “Rameau’s Les Sauvages and the Aporia of Musical Na­­ ture” in Bloechl, Native American Song. 35.  Rameau, quoted in Klotz, “Tartini the Indian,” 285. 36.  Klotz, “Tartini the Indian,” and Bloechl, Native American Song, 194–­200. 37.  Bloechl, 194–­200. 38.  Klotz, “Tartini the Indian,” 286. 39.  Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment ; Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought. 40.  See discussion in Christensen, 211. 41.  Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment, 56–­78. 42.  Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 209–­90. 43.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot”; Revers, “Jean-­Joseph Marie Amiot in Beijing”; Lam, “Jean-­Joseph-­Marie Amiot’s Writings on Chinese Music”; Levy, “Joseph Amiot and Enlightenment Speculation.” 44.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot,” 10. 45.  Rameau, Code de musique pratique, 189. 46.  Rameau, 189. 47.  Rameau, 226–­27; Levy,  “Joseph Amiot and Enlightenment Speculation,” 69–­70. 48.  Most of the literature on this subject in European languages revolves around the contention over whether musicians in China or the West were the first to theorize equal

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temperament. For one version see Cho, Discovery of Musical Equal Temperament in China and Europe. 49.  Standaert, Handbook of Christianity in China, 1:534–­92. 50.  Anon., “Li Guangdi,” in Encyclopedia of Confucianism, 1:362–­63. 51.  Hu, China’s Transition to Modernity, 69–­70, 104–­8. 52.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot.” 53.  Quoted in Chu and Ding, Qing Encounters, 147. 54.  Cohen, “ ‘Gift of Nature,’ ” 69. 55.  Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 552–­55. 56.  Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 301. 57.  Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment, 56–­78, and Verba, “Jean-­Jacques Rousseau,” 319. 58.  Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, 37–­39; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 486. 59.  In this respect I agree with Herbert Schneider’s assessment that Rameau was closer to Wolff than to Malebranche. See Schneider, Rameau’s letzter Musiktraktat, 95. 60.  Rehding, “Music-­Historical Egyptomania,” 560–­66. 61.  Rehding, 563–­66. 62.  Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois. 63.  Tchen, Musique chinoise en France; Levy, “Joseph Amiot and Enlightenment Speculation.” 64.  Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, 164–­65. 65.  Amiot, 165. 66.  Amiot, 166. 67.  Amiot, 166. 68.  Amiot, 167. 69.  Gluck [Calzabigi], Alceste, 1–­2. 70.  Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, 2. 71.  Amiot, 2–­3. 72.  See chapters 4 and 5 below. 73.  Bloechl, Native American Song, 219–­20. 74.  Grimm, “Letter on Omphale,” in Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 106. 75.  Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment ; Charlton, Opera in the Age of  Rousseau. 76.  Gelbart, “Rousseau and the Quest for Universals,” 280. 77.  Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 388. 78.  Rousseau, “Music,” in Dictionary of Music, 257–­68. On the genesis of the Dictionnaire and the relation of its articles to Rousseau’s contributions to the Encyclopédie, see Verba, “Jean-­Jacques Rousseau.” 79.  Rousseau, “Music,” 263. 80.  Rousseau, 263. 81.  Rousseau, “Characters of Music,” in Dictionary of Music, 58. 82.  Lo, “New Documents on the Encounter between European and Chinese Music.”

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83.  Bohlman, “European Discovery of  Music in the Islamic World.” 84.  See Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, and chapters 3, 5, and 7 below. 85.  Rousseau was aware of the danger of this oversimplification; see Bloechl, Native American Song, 191. 86.  Rousseau, “Social Contract” and “Discourses,” 259. 87.  See also Martin, “Les planches de musique de l’Encyclopédie.” My sincere thanks are due to him for a critique of an earlier version of the chapter in a lengthy private communication. 88.  Summed up in Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment.” 89.  Taylor, Hegel, 3–­51. 90.  See the bibliography in Adler and Koepke, Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, 421–­58. 91.  Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. 92.  Trabant, “Herder’s Discovery of the Ear.” 93.  Bohlman, “Herder and the Global Moment,” 257–­64. 94.  Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 432. 95.  Herder, 434. 96.  Herder, 434–­35. 97.  Herder, 435. 98.  Herder, 438. 99.  Herder, 440. 100.  Osbeck, Torén, and Ekeberg, Voyage to China; Pallas, Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten ueber die mongolischen Voelkerschaften. 101.  Herder, “Kommentar,” in Ideen, 901–­11. 102.  Mendelssohn, “Ueber die Frage, was heiszt Aufklären.” 103.  Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, 91–­95. 104.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 271–­309. 105.  Zhang, “ ‘ Tao’ and the ‘Logos.’ ” 106.  Kondylis, Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. 107.  Beiser, Fate of Reason, 61–­74. 108.  Sebastian Klotz makes this point in “Tartini the Indian,” 293. 109.  Piekut, “Actor-­Networks in Music History.” 110.  On competing agendas in music at Qianlong’s court see Jia, “Dissemination of Western Music.” 111.  I thank Joseph Lam for bringing this aspect to my attention. 112.  Hu, China’s Transition to Modernity. 113.  Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity; Gramit, Cultivating Music; Potter, Most German of the Arts; Applegate, Bach in Berlin. 114.  Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History”; Born, “For a Relational Mu­ sicology”; Gelbart, Invention of  “Folk Music” and “Art Music.” 115.  Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik; Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; Neubauer, Emancipation of Music from Language. 116.  Bohlman, “Herder and the Global Moment.”

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Chapter Two 1.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, and Van Dyke, “Port Canton.” For a comprehensive bibliography of  Western travel writing on the Canton trade, see Van Dyke’s “Western Sources of the China Trade.” I thank Paul van Dyke for bringing this last publication to my attention. See also Carroll, “Canton System.” I also owe a debt of inspiration to Amitav Ghosh’s novel River of Smoke. 2.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 170. 3.  Hence I use the label “Western” and not European. 4.  The Canton Register, published from 1827 onward and a frequent source of firsthand information on the latter days of the Canton System, is less rewarding. Perhaps this reflects its editors’ apparent disdain for Chinese cultural products. On the subject of Chinese literature they wrote that it “can communicate now nothing, we apprehend, but amusement, for the sake of which it is not right to neglect business.” Anon., “Plan for Effecting Translations of Oriental Works,” 128. 5.  On the idea of a “contact zone” see Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Both John Carroll and Fa­Ti Fan use the term to describe Canton before 1839. See Carroll, “Canton System,” and Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 16–­17. See also Chen, Merchants of  War and Peace. 6.  Carroll, “Canton System.” 7.  Liebersohn, Travelers’ World, 1–­14. 8.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China. 9.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 38–­39. 10.  For more on Neumann, see Rückert, “ ‘Seltensten und kostbarsten Werke chinesischer Literatur.’ ” 11.  Neumann, “Chinareise Karl Friedrich Neumanns in den Jahren 1830/31.” I thank Dr. Ingrid Rückert for helping me learn more about Neumann and kindly providing a typescript transcription of the memoir. 12.  For an overview of the conditions of the trade see Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 19–­34. 13.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 1:73–­74. 14.  Hunter, Bits of Old China, 197–­98. 15.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 1:73. 16.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 58. 17.  Shaw and Quincy,  Journals of  Major Samuel Shaw, 179–­80. 18.  See Irvine, “Klang und Souveränität.” 19.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 1:148. 20.  Gilpin, Observations, and Price, Essays on the Picturesque. British reception of Chinese gardening played a role in codifying the picturesque: see Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. See also Annette Richards, Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. 21.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 53. 22.  Sutton, East India Company’s Maritime Service, 66; the foreign ships here would be Swedish and Dutch. 23.  Osbeck, Torén, and Ekeberg, Voyage to China, 188. 24.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:293–­94. 25.  Burke, Philosophical Enquiry.

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26.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 32. 27.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:297. 28.  Downing, 2:297. 29.  Downing, 2:300. 30.  Downing, 2:296–­97. 31.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 60. 32.  Johnson, Oriental Voyager, 173. 33.  Reynolds, Voyage of the United States Frigate “Potomac,” 344. 34.  Meyen, Reise um die Erde, 347. 35.  Johnson, Oriental Voyager, 171. 36.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 1:216. 37.  Burford, Description of a View of Canton, n.p. 38.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 61. 39.  Hunter, Bits of Old China, 19. 40.  Abbott, China and the English, 78. 41.  Abbott, 80–­81. 42.  Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes. 43.  Osbeck, Torén, and Ekeberg, Voyage to China, 186–­87. 44.  Shaw and Quincy,  Journals of  Major Samuel Shaw, 180. 45.  H., “Drone,” 3–­6. 46.  Daily, Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China; Kitson, Forging Roman­­ tic China, 70–­94. 47.  Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, 1:211. 48.  Morrison, 2:375–­76. 49.  Morrison, 2:502. 50.  Morrison, 2:529. 51.  On the role of interpreters see Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 77–­94. 52.  Hunter, Bits of Old China, 23–­24. 53.  Hunter, 23–­24. 54.  Meyen, Reise um die Erde, 2:358. 55.  Johnson, Oriental Voyager, 193. 56.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:120–­21. 57.  Johnson, Oriental Voyager, 178. 58.  Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 60–­94. 59.  Longman and Abel, Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China, 74. 60.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:238. 61.  Downing, 237–­38. 62.  Neumann, “Chinareise,” 41b. 63.  Neumann, 41c. 64.  The songbook is likely D Mbsb 4 L.sin. I 3: Ziyong Zhao, Yue Ou (Guangzhou: Xi guan zheng tian ge, 1828). These were translated into English around 1900 by Cecil Clementi, later governor of Hong Kong: Zhao, Cantonese Love-­Songs. Lackner, “Chi­ nesische Sammlung von Karl Friedrich Neumann,” 183–­87. 65.  Quoted in Johnson, “Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” 1.

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66.  Johnson, 2. 67.  Anon., “Ueber die Musik der Chineser,” 66. 68.  For historical background see Ng, Rise of Cantonese Opera, 11–­80. 69.  Anon., “Ueber die Musik der Chineser,” 66. 70.  Neumann, “Fortsetzung der Reise,” in “Chinareise,” 7. 71.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:133. 72.  Downing, 2:128. 73.  Downing, 1:302–­3. 74.  Anon., “Ueber die Musik der Chineser,” 66. 75.  Meyen, Reise um die Erde, 390. 76.  Meyen, 392. 77.  Hickey, Memoirs of  William Hickey, 1:223–­24. 78.  Ochoa Gaultier, Aurality, 74. 79.  Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 61, 75. 80.  Leppert, Music and Image; Clery, Feminization Debate; Head, Sovereign Feminine. 81.  Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, 65. 82.  Woodfield, Music of the Raj (esp. chaps. 3 and 4) on male and female roles in British Calcutta around 1800. 83.  Cooper, “Lind, James.” 84.  This meeting and the circumstances that led to it are described in chapter 3 below. 85.  James Lind to Charles Burney, November 11, 1775. 86.  I thank Yingcheng Lee and Wing Chung Ng for their translations of the title page and Louise Zeitlin for helping me place it. Little is known about naamyam in the High Qing era. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it was often practiced by blind women singers in private homes or brothels. Personal communication, Wing Chung Ng, November 23, 2016. 87.  Anon., “Tale of the Dressing Case.” 88.  See Zeitlin, “ ‘Notes of Flesh’ and the Courtesan’s Song in Seventeenth-­Century China,” 82–­83, for a discussion of likely performance contexts. 89.  On Burney’s correspondence with Raper see chapter 3 below. 90.  I thank Patrick Connor for bringing these paintings to my attention; they are described in Connor, From China to the West, 6–­9. 91.  “Yee-­yine” [erhu]. Anon. Canton 1770s? Watercolor on gouache over traces of pencil, 11¼ by 17¼ inches. Martyn Gregory Gallery. For further discussion of Qing dynasty depictions of the erhu see Huehns, “Lovely Ladies Stroking Strings.” I discuss the further use of Raper’s paintings in British writings about Chinese music in chap­­ ter 4 below. 92.  Cooper, “Lind, James.” 93.  For more on Raper see chapter 4 below. 94.  Neumann, “Chinareise,” 1–­2. 95.  Meyen, Reise um die Erde, 325. On the intellectual atmosphere of the British factory see Kitson, Forging Romantic China, chap. 4 (98–­125). 96.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 3:527.

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97.  Hunter, Bits of Old China, 1:24. 98.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:237–­38. 99.  Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-­Headed Hydra. On the connection between per­­ ceptions of  British and Chinese poverty see Chen, “British View of Chinese Civilization.” 100.  Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade” 101.  Lampe, Work, Class, and Power, 117–­74. 102.  See Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 148. 103.  Neumann, Translations  from the Chinese and Armenian, 99n1. 104.  Lampe, Work, Class, and Power, 1–­14. 105.  Nicol and Howell, Life and Adventures of  John Nicol. See the discussion in Lampe, Work, Class, and Power, 159–­61. 106.  See Irvine, “Klang und Souveränität.” 107.  Neumann, “Chinareise,” 38a. 108.  Neumann, 10a. 109.  Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 133. 110.  Dana, 289. 111.  Neumann, “Chinareise,” 23a. 112.  Neumann, 9a–­9c. 113.  Neumann, 17d. 114.  Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 203. 115.  For a parallel maritime soundscape (lower Manhattan and Long Island in the early nineteenth century) see Smith, Creolization of American Culture, 79–­121. 116.  Porter, “Monstrous Beauty.” 117.  Attali, Noise, 6. 118.  On sound, sequencing, and social order see Leppert, “Reading the Sonoric Landscape,” 410–­13. 119.  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, 41–­81. 120.  Chen, “British View of Chinese Civilization.” 121.  Radano and Olaniyan, “Introduction: Hearing Empire—­Imperial Listening,” 1–­24. Chapter Three 1.  For biographies see Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, and Scholes, Great Dr. Burney. On Burney as traveler see Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus. Matthew Gelbart discusses Burney at length in Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music.” Emily Dolan engages with Burney’s interest in science (particularly astronomy) in “Music as an Object of Natural History.” 2.  Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, and Burney, Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces. 3.  Burney, General History of Music (1776); General History of Music (1782), vol. 2; General History of  Music, rev. ed. (1789), vols. 1–­3. 4.  Burney, “Chinese Music.” 5.  Exceptions are Clarke, “Encounter with Chinese Music,” and Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney, and the Qianlong Emperor.”

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6.  Lam, Idea of Chinese Music in Europe; Lo, “New Documents on the Encounter between European and Chinese Music”; Tchen, Musique chinoise en France. 7.  See Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 143, 160–­61. 8.  Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois. 9.  For parallel efforts in other fields see Kitson, Forging Romantic China. 10.  Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 11–­14; see also Agnew, “Scots Orpheus.” 11.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 130–­33. 12.  Burney, Tours, ed. Scholes, 1:xxv–­xxvii. 13.  On Burney’s “radical” approach to music and musical instruments as objects of experiment see Dolan, “Music as an Object of Natural History.” 14.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 86; Burney, Tours, 1:25. 15.  Lonsdale, 29. On Suard see Darnton, “High Enlightenment and the Low-­Life of Literature,” 81–­85. 16.  Burney, Tours, 1:25. 17.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot,” 10–­11. 18.  Picard, 10–­12. 19.  See chapter 1 above. 20.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot,” 10. 21.  Arnaud and Suard, “Traduction manuscrite d’un livre sur l’ancienne musique chinoise.” 22.  Arnaud and Suard. 23.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser.” 24.  Rehding, “Music-­Historical Egyptomania,” 563–­66. 25.  Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois. 26.  Burney, Tours, 1:43–­45. 27.  The best discussion of Voltaire’s views on China in wider European contexts is in Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 292–­93 and passim. 28.  Gascoigne,  Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, 176. 29.  Volpilhac-­Auger, “Voltaire and History.” 30.  Burney, Tours, 1:313–­15. 31.  Bohlman, “European Discovery of Music in the Islamic World.” 32.  Burney, Tours, 1:315. 33.  Burney, 1:317. 34.  Burney, 1:317. 35.  Burney to Suard, May 24, 1771, in Burney, Letters, 82. 36.  Burney to Suard, 82–­83. 37.  Gascoigne,  Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, 119–­84. 38.  My account in the following paragraphs follows Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 111–­12, and Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe,” 205–­9. 39.  Rodger, Insatiable Earl. 40.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 111–­12. 41.  Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 89–­110, and Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe.”

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42.  The subject doesn’t figure in the summary Burney sent to his friend Samuel Crisp in late May 1771. Burney to Samuel Crisp, May 31, 1771, in Burney, Letters, 88–­92. 43.  Charles Burney to James Lind, September 19, 1774, in Burney, Letters, 173. 44.  Cooper, “Lind, James.” On Lind’s activities in Canton see also the discussion in chapter 2 above. Lind later became a royal physician in the household of George III: Fanny Burney recalled visiting his apartments in Windsor, which included a “chiefly Chinese” collection of “Eastern curiosities.” Cited in Burney, Letters, 173n4. See also Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 59 (Kitson, however, confuses Charles Burney there with his son the book collector Charles Burney Jr.). 45.  Charles Burney to James Lind, September 19, 1774, Burney, Letters, 173. 46.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 157. 47.  Lonsdale, 145. 48.  Lonsdale, 189–­225. 49.  Charles Burney to Thomas Twining, April 28, 1773, in Burney, Letters, 126. 50.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 144. 51.  Charles Burney to James Lind, September 19, 1774, in Burney, Letters, 173. This letter is unusual in that it survives in a printed source in addition to Burney’s draft now in the Osborn Collection in the Beinecke library at Yale. The letter was printed—­ presumably from Lind’s own copy—­in the Monthly Magazine in 1820; see Ribeiro’s “Textual Introduction” in Burney, Letters, xxxiii. The printed copy reads “in counterparts,” but Burney’s draft reads “in counterpoint.”  The latter seems more likely. 52.  Burney, 173–­74; emphasis in original. 53.  Burney, 174. 54.  James Lind to Charles Burney, November 11, 1774, US OSB MSS 3, box 12, folder 884. All the citations in following paragraphs are from this letter. 55.  The association of Scotland with non-­European musics, particularly in Burney’s writings, is a key theme in Gelbart, Invention of  “Folk Music” and “Art Music.” 56.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 142–­43. 57.  See the discussion of Rousseau’s view of Chinese music in chapter 1. 58.  I discuss the latter in chapter 2. 59.  Burney, “Chinese Music,” n.p. 60.  Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company, 130. 61.  Connor, From China to the West, 9. 62.  Royal Society archive EC/1782/11. 63.  Connor, From China to the West, 9. 64.  Burney to Matthew Raper [draft, September–­October 1777], in Burney, Letters, 232. 65.  Burney to James Lind, September 19, 1774, in Burney, Letters, 173. 66.  Burney to Matthew Raper [draft, September–­October 1777], in Burney, Letters, 231–­35. 67.  Burney refers to “the answers to my Queries made in Italian at Pekin.” Burney, Letters, 232. 68.  Burney, Letters, 232.

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69.  Clarke, “Encounter with Chinese Music.” 70.  Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques, 2:958–­62. 71.  Legge, Sacred Books of China, xii–­xiii. 72.  Burney, Letters, 232. 73.  In the Cyclopaedia Burney refers to an “MS Treatise.” 74.  Burney, Letters, 233. 75.  Just how and when this theory was developed is a matter of contention. The most recent book-­length treatment is Cho, Discovery of  Musical Equal Temperament. 76.  Burney, Letters, 233–­34. 77.  Burney, 235. 78.  Burney, “Chinese Music,” n.p. 79.  Scholes, Great Dr. Burney, 2:279; Burney, Memoirs. 80.  Burney, Letters, 234; see also Irving, “Comparative Organography,” 376–­78. 81.  Connor, From China to the West, 6–­10. 82.  Listed in Connor, 72. I thank Patrick Connor for sharing an image of this painting with me. 83.  Connor, From China to the West, 74. On other versions of this painting see Huehns, “Lovely Ladies Stroking Strings,” 28–­29. 84.  Barrow et al., “Original Drawings.” 85.  Connor, From China to the West, 7; Barrow, Travels in China, 315–­16. 86.  Burney to Charles Davy, November 3, 1774, in Burney, Letters, 177. 87.  Burney to Thomas Twining, [late] August 1774, in Burney, Letters, 172. 88.  Burney to James Lind, September 19, 1774, in Burney, Letters. 89.  Burney, Letters, 178–­79. The identities of the “intelligent persons” are unclear. Lind gave Burney the names of other gentlemen in London and abroad with experience of Canton. Burney replied that he had not been able to consult them because of  “a most severe fit of rheumatism.” See Lind’s letter to Burney of November 11, 1774, and Burney’s reply of November 26 in Burney, Letters, 178–­80. 90.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 158. 91.  Lonsdale, 180–­81. 92.  Burney, General History of  Music (1776), 36–­37. 93.  Burney, 37. 94.  Burney, 38. 95.  Burney, 38. 96.  Burney, 38. 97.  Gelbart, Invention of  “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 115. 98.  Gelbart, 118. 99.  Gelbart, 128. 100.  Gelbart, 40. 101.  Gelbart, 41. 102.  Gelbart, 41. 103.  Burney, General History of  Music (1789); the section on China is in 1:45–­48. 104.  Burney, 2:703. 105.  Burney, 2:503.

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106.  Burney, 2:503. 107.  Burney, 2:703. 108.  Burney, 2:704. 109.  For an incisive discussion of the “Essay on Criticism” see Mahiet, “Charles Burney.” 110.  Burney, “Essay on Criticism,” in A General History of  Music (1789), 3:v–­xii. 111.  Burney, 3:xi. Chapter Four 1.  Osterhammel, China und die Weltgesellschaft, 122. 2.  Accounts of the politics surrounding the kowtow include Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar ; Pritchard, “Kotow in the Macartney Embassy to China”; and Hevia, Crucial Years. Zhang summarizes contemporary Chinese reactions to the embassy in “Historical Anachronism,” 31–­42. 3.  Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 229–­48. Hevia’s book sparked some controversy: see Esherick, “Cherishing Sources from Afar.” 4.  Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney and the Qianlong Emperor,” 444. 5.  See chapter 5 below. 6.  Clingham, “Cultural Difference”; Berg, “Britain, Industry and Perceptions of China”; Chen, “British View of Chinese Civilization.” 7.  Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company, 2:232–­41. 8.  Marshall, “Britain and China.” 9.  Ogborn, Global Lives; Gascoigne,  Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment. 10.  Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe”; Agnew, “Listening to Others.” 11.  Marshall, “Britain and China,” 22. 12.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 158. 13.  Osterhammel, 77. See also the discussion of listeners from the “lettered city” in my introduction, at note 44. 14.  Davies and Lockhart, “Introduction: Fantasies of  Total Description.” 15.  My main sources are Hüttner, Nachricht ; Staunton, Authentic Account ; Macartney, Embassy to China; Anderson, Narrative of the British Embassy; Holmes, Journal of Mr Samuel Holmes; and Barrow, Travels in China. 16.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 308. 17.  On Hüttner’s biography see Hüttner, Nachricht, 88, and Gedan, Johann Christian Hüttner. 18.  See chapter 5 below. 19.  Colley, “Britishness and Otherness,” 310. 20.  Although Macartney’s entourage consisted of fewer than one hundred men, members of his staff estimated that nearly three thousand Chinese workers were required to carry their baggage. Barrow, Travels in China, 88; Macartney, Embassy to China, 91n. 21.  Macartney, 78. 22.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 1:250. 23.  Anderson, Narrative of the British Embassy, 102.

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24.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 101–­2. 25.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 1:253. 26.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 253. 27.  Anon., “Ruderliedchen aus China.” 28.  Anon., “Ruderliedchen aus China,” 37. 29.  Anon., “Ruderliedchen aus China,” 38. 30.  Moon, Yellowface, 20–­21. 31.  Barrow, Travels in China, 81. 32.  Alexander, “Journal of a Voyage to Pekin in China,” 22r. 33.  Dinwiddie, Biographical Memoir, 38. 34.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 90. 35.  See note 2 above. 36.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 90–­91; the concert is also mentioned in Anderson, Narrative, 141. 37.  Anderson, 142–­43. 38.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 91. 39.  Barrow, Travels in China, 93. 40.  Barrow, 94. 41.  See chapter 2. 42.  Barrow, Travels in China, 95. 43.  Anderson, Narrative, 106. 44.  Anderson, 106. 45.  Anderson, 163. 46.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 92. 47.  Macartney, 95. 48.  Macartney, 95. 49.  Dinwiddie, Biographical Memoir, 45. 50.  Smith, “Sing-­Song Trade.” 51.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 98. 52.  Anderson, Narrative, 178. 53.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 30. 54.  Macartney, 104. 55.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 112–­13. 56.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 100. 57.  See chapter 3 above. 58.  Joseph de Grammont to Lord Macartney, May 7, 1793. 59.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 179. 60.  Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney, and the Qianlong Emperor,” 4–­5. 61.  See chapter 5 below for more on Macartney’s consultations with Burney. 62.  Burney, “Chinese Music.”  The staff member most likely to have joined these performances would have been the portrait painter Thomas Hickey, who played the flute. 63.  Burney, “Chinese Music”; for further discussion see chapter 5 below. 64.  Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 79; Berg, “Britain, Industry, and Perceptions of China,” 279.

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65.  Dolan, “Music as an Object of  Natural History,” 35–­36. 66.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 104. 67.  Macartney, 104. 68.  Macartney, 104. 69.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 182. 70.  Anderson, Narrative, 136; Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney, and the Qianlong Emperor,” 446. 71.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 115. 72.  Macartney, 115–­16. According to Staunton the “black boy” had been acquired in Batavia and made an impression on the Chinese because “nothing like him had been remembered to be seen before in . . . inland China.” Staunton, Authentic Account, 261. 73.  Holmes,  Journal of  Mr Samuel Holmes, 143. 74.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 206. 75.  Forêt, Mapping Chengde, 14. 76.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 133. See also the discussion in Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 208. 77.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 117–­21; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 100–­102. 78.  Anderson, Narrative, 219. 79.  Anderson, 219–­20. 80.  Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual.” 81.  Anderson, Narrative, 220; Macartney, Embassy to China, 123. 82.  Holmes,  Journal of  Mr Samuel Holmes, 144. 83.  Staunton,  Authentic Account, 228. 84.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 123. 85.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 230. William Alexander’s well-­known drawing of Macartney’s presentation to Qianlong shows Hüttner and the others standing near the imperial throne. But it was made after the fact, since Alexander had stayed behind in Beijing with Barrow and others to look after the embassy’s mechanical gifts. 86.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 181. 87.  Ye, “Ascendant Peace,” 89. 88.  Ye, 91. 89.  Burney, “Chinese Music,” n.p. 90.  Hüttner, “Chinesisches Blumenlied,” 53. 91.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 124. The reference to King Solomon is from Matthew 6:28–­29: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” 92.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 274. 93.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 131. 94.  Macartney, 131. 95.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 164–­65. 96.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 131. 97.  Macartney, 131. 98.  Milton, Paradise Lost, book 7, lines 247–­49.

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99.  Kramer, “Recalling the Sublime”; Mathew, Political Beethoven, 107 (see references there to a large literature). 100.  Mathew, 108. 101.  Robbins Landon, Haydn in England, 1791–­1795, 316. The translation from Haydn’s German is his. 102.  See chapter 5 below for more on Burney’s association with Macartney. 103.  Robbins Landon, Haydn: The Years of  “The Creation,” 1796–­1800, 628. 104.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 125. The phrase is another allusion to Paradise Lost (book 4, line 35). 105.  Mackerras, “Peking Opera,” 110–­11. 106.  Goldman, Opera and the City, 106. 107.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 137. 108.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 133. 109.  Goldman, Opera and the City, 107. See also Idema, “Performances on a Three-­ Tiered Stage,” 205. 110.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 265–­66. 111.  Goldman, Opera and the City, 109. 112.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 133. 113.  Ye, “Ascendant Peace,” 91–­92 and passim. 114.  Ye, 100–­101. 115.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 157. 116.  Macartney, 138. 117.  Stock, “Four Recurring Themes in Histories of Chinese Music,” 399. 118.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 131. 119.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 151. 120.  Barrow, Travels in China, 119–­20. 121.  Literary Digest 20 (March 17, 1900): 344, cited in Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 232. 122.  Chen, “British View of Chinese Civilization,” 197. 123.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 160–­61. Chapter Five 1.  Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 3:217. See also Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 362, and Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney and the Qianlong Emperor.” 2.  Boswell, Boswell’s Life of  Johnson, 552–­55. 3.  Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 3:223. 4.  Burney, 3:217. 5.  Burney, 3:218. 6.  East India Company, “Accounts and Records relative to the Embassy.” 7.  Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 3:157. 8.  Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney, and the Qianlong Emperor,” 4–­5. 9.  Charles Burney to Lord Macartney [draft memorandum]. 10.  Burney, “Chinese Music,” n.p. 11.  Berg, “Britain, Industry and Perceptions of China.” See chapter 4 above.

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12.  Charles Burney to Lord Macartney [draft memorandum]. 13.  See chapter 4 above. 14.  See, e.g., note 23. 15.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 262–­63. 16.  Hüttner assisted Staunton in composing the Authentic Account : see Hüttner, Nachricht, 85. 17.  Staunton, Authentic Account, 262. 18.  Staunton, 262. 19.  This and the following quotations are from Hüttner, Nachricht, 180–­81. 20.  With the exception of the citations of Hüttner in Harrison, Time, Place, and Music, 167–­94. 21.  East India Company ledger. 22.  On Burney’s work for Rees see Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 407–­31. 23.  Burney to Hüttner [draft letter], March 19, 1802. 24.  Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney, 429. 25.  Fend, “La Borde, Jean-­Benjamin de”; Filar, “Jean-­Benjamin de Labore’s Abrégé d’un traité de composition.” 26.  Ginguené, “Chinois (Musique des).” I thank Nathan Martin for directing my attention to this source. 27.  All the quotations in the following section are from Burney, “Chinese Music,” which is not paginated. 28.  He does not mention James Lind by name. 29.  See chapter 1 above. 30.  This echoes Burney’s observations elsewhere about the effect of French music on non-­Europeans, including an attempt to expose a Tahitian in Paris to French opera. See Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe,” 218. 31.  See Lindorff, “Burney, Macartney and the Qianlong Emperor,” 450, and chapter 4 above. 32.  The reference is to Twelfth Night. 33.  Quoted in Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe,” 221–­22. 34.  I have not been able to establish the origin of the quotation from Amiot. 35.  Here Burney quotes (partially) from Amiot’s polite praise of Roussier’s work on ancient Egyptian and Greek music in the introduction to the Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois (9): “Son ouvrage sur la musique des anciens, nous eût peut-­être fait connaître à fond le plus ancien système de musique qui ait eu cours dans l’univers; & en l’exposant avec cette clarté, cette précision, cette méthode, qui ne laissent, pour ainsi dire, rien à dé desirer, il eût servi comme de flambeau pour éclairer tout à la fois, & les gens de lettres, & les harmonistes.” My thanks to Nathan Martin for pointing this out. 36.  See note 35. 37.  Needham and Robinson, “Sound (Acoustics).” 38.  Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music.” 39.  On European musicians at the court of the Qianlong emperor see Jia, “Dissemi­ nation of  Western Music,” 142–­70.

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40.  Burney, “Essay on Criticism,” 8. 41.  See Mahiet, “Charles Burney.” 42.  The quotation, slightly garbled, comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part 1, per­­ haps from memory. 43.  See chapter 4 above. 44.  Discussed in detail in chapter 4 above. 45.  However, in his memoir Hüttner does report attempting to observe Chinese people listening to the band: Nachricht, 182. 46.  Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 11–­12. 47.  Gelbart, Invention of  “Folk Music” and “Art Music.” 48.  Irving, “Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe.” 49.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 385–­93. 50.  See Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of  Letters, for the most recent survey. 51.  Hu, China’s Transition to Modernity. 52.  Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music,” 142–­45. 53.  Jia, 142–­45. 54.  Labio, “Adam Smith’s Aesthetics.” 55.  Wollstonecraft [signed M], “Review of ‘Dr. Burney’s General History of Music,’ ” 31. See also Mahiet, “Charles Burney,” 56. Chapter Six 1.  Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 80–­124. 2.  Gramit, Cultivating Music, 34–­36 (on Forkel) and 58–­59 (on Marx). 3.  On “Germanness” in music see also the essays in Gregor and Irvine, Dreams of Germany. 4.  Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 110–­13. 5.  Agnew, 110; on Burney’s theory of music history see chapter 4 above. 6.  See chapter 3 above. 7.  Quoted in Davies and Lockhart, “Introduction: Fantasies of  Total Description,” 1. 8.  For comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information see Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst. Oliver Wiener offers an ambitious analytical study of Forkel’s historical writings in Apolls musikalische Reisen. Information about Forkel’s early years and his decision to study in Göttingen is in Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst, 83–­95. 9.  Fischer, 47–­63. See also Clark, Academic Charisma, 245–­46 and 316–­24. 10.  On Forkel’s contacts with the Göttinger Hain see Fischer, 282–­84. For a general introduction to the group see Martus, Aufklärung, 717–­26. 11.  On Forkel’s exposure to the Göttingen historians see Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 4–­16 and 26–­35. See also Harbsmeier, “World Histories before Domestication,” especially 116–­22. 12.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 62–­63. 13.  See the discussion in Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 20–­21. 14.  For a musicological discussion of eighteenth-­century models of historical progress see Tomlinson, “Vico’s Songs,” 344–­7 7.

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15.  Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 11–­13. 16.  Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire; Wilson, Holy Roman Empire. See also Glatthorn, “Theatre of Politics and the Politics of  Theatre.” 17.  Wiener,  Apolls musikalische Reisen, 11–­12. 18.  On the relation between print culture and nationalism see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 43–­46. For an overview of the growth of the German-­language public sphere in print see Martus, Aufklärung, 730–­39. 19.  Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 11–­12; Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst, 283–­84. 20.  La Borde, Essai sur la musique. 21.  Arnaud and Suard, “Traduction manuscrite d’un livre sur l’ancienne musique chinoise.” La Borde claims to be aware that his discussion of the manuscript is similar to Arnaud’s but says he came to his conclusions independently before reading Arnaud’s text (La Borde, Essai sur la musique). This is not the only text originally by Arnaud transmitted via La Borde to one of Forkel’s publications. Forkel translated an early essay by Arnaud, written during the querelle des bouffons in 1754 and reprinted during the querelle des Gluckistes et Piccinistes in La Borde’s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, in his own Geschichte der italienischen Oper of 1789. Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst, 361. 22.  Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 193–­98. 23.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 178. 24.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser,” 233. 25.  Forkel, 233–­34. 26.  Forkel, 234. 27.  Forkel, 234. 28.  Forkel, 234. 29.  See chapter 1 above. 30.  Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 662–­64; Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 300–­ 304. 31.  Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 37. On Meiners’s explicitly racist Eurocentrism see Harbsmeier, “World Histories before Domestication,” 105–­7. Meiners’s texts on China are in Abhandlungen sinesischer Jesuiten. Wiener and Fischer assume incorrectly that Meiners’s collection is the source of the text Forkel reviews in the Almanach: Wiener, Apolls musikalische Reisen, 480, and Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst, 741. 32.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser,” 233. 33.  Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment. 34.  Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte, 1:3. 35.  Forkel, 1:5. 36.  Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 332. 37.  Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte, 1:6. 38.  Forkel, 1:6. 39.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser,” 242. 40.  Forkel, 243. 41.  Picard, “Joseph-­Marie Amiot.”

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42.  Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens, 68–­72; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients. 43.  Picard, “Music (17th and 18th Centuries)”; Lindorff, “Missionaries, Keyboards and Musical Exchange”; and Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music.” 44.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser,” 263. 45.  Forkel, 263. 46.  Forkel/La Borde’s account of Kangxi’s edict seems to be drawn partially from Amiot’s chronicle of a failed attempt at musical reform in the Song dynasty; see Amiot, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, 46–­47. It echoes the real Kangxi’s attempts to introduce various musical innovations, such as a new theoretical division of the octave. Jia, “Dissemination of  Western Music,” 62–­63. 47.  Beales, Joseph II, 2:314–­26, and Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 2:417–­26. 48.  Reinalter, “Joseph II., der Josephinismus und die Aufklärung.” 49.  Jacobsen, “Limits to Despotism.” 50.  Martus, Aufklärung, 737. 51.  Forkel, “Von der Musik der Chineser,” 268. 52.  Forkel, 268. 53.  Forkel, 270. 54.  Forkel, 271. 55.  Lessing, Laokoon. The best recent account in English of Lessing’s poetics is in Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 244–­82. 56.  For a discussion of Forkel’s involvement in the querelle des Gluckistes et Piccinistes, see Fischer, Wissenschaftliche der Kunst, 354–­58. 57.  Rushton and Couvreur, “Arnaud, François.” 58.  See Richards, Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. 59.  Forkel, “Ueber eine Sonate,” 22–­38. 60.  Kramer, Cherubino’s Leap, 52–­54. 61.  Forkel, “Ueber eine Sonate,” 26. 62.  Martus,  Aufklärung, 753–­62. 63.  Martus, 730–­39. 64.  Hüttner, Nachricht (see chapter 4 above); Anon., “Ueber die Musik der Chineser” (see chapter 2 above). 65.  Fink, “Chinesische Musik.” 66.  Fochert, “Adolf Bernhard Marx und seine Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung”; Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity”; Burnham, Beethoven Hero; and Applegate, Bach in Berlin. 67.  On Marx’s transition from law to music see Sheehy, “Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self,” 202–­9. 68.  For a further discussion see Sheehy, 86–­101. 69.  On Marx’s Handel reception see Sheehy, 116–­18. 70.  Sheehy, 173–­233. 71.  Carl Dahlhaus (re)introduced the idea of “twin styles” (Beethoven and Rossini): see Dahlhaus, Nineteenth Century Music, 8–­15. The distinction was originally drawn by Viennese music historian Raphael Georg Kiesewetter. See Webster, “Beethoven,

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Rossini—­and Others.” See also Steinberg, Listening to Reason; the discussion in Peder­­ son, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” 89–­91; and the essays in Mathew and Walton, Invention of Beethoven and Rossini. 72.  On Marx’s Hegelianism see Sheehy, “Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self,” 217–­19. See also Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 107–­11, and Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” 90–­91. As Applegate points out, Marx adapted Hegel’s philosophy of history for his own purposes but did not engage with Hegel’s aesthetic theory. 73.  Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 107–­14. 74.  On Hegel’s account of China see Bernasconi, “China on Parade.” 75.  Marx, “Wer ist zu der Theilnahme,” 2; see also Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 112. 76.  Marx, “Wer ist zu der Theilnahme,” 3. 77.  Marx, 3. 78.  Marx, 4. 79.  Applegate, Bach in Berlin, 107. 80.  On Schilling’s wider attention to non-­Western music, see Gramit, Cultivating Music, 41–­62. 81.  Marx, “China—­chinesische Musik.” Marx appears to draw much of his material from his rival Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s article “Chinesische Musik” and the passages on China in Fink’s Erste Wanderung der ältesten Tonkunst, 60–­91. 82.  Marx, “China—­chinesische Musik,” 204. 83.  Marx, 205. 84.  Marx, 205. 85.  Marx, 206. 86.  For a wide discussion of how China has been made to fit into Western historical narratives see Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. 87.  The following draws on Sheehy, “Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self,” 185–­252. 88.  Bernasconi, “China on Parade.” 89.  Sheehy, “Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self,” 223. 90.  Marx, “China—­chinesische Musik,” 205. See Gelbart, Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 111–­38, and chapter 3 above. 91.  Mathew and Walton, “Introduction: Pleasure in History,” in Invention of Bee­­ thoven and Rossini. 92.  Marx, “China—­chinesische Musik,” 208. 93.  Marx, 209. 94.  Marx, 209. 95.  Marx, 210. 96.  Hegel, Philosophy of History, 121, 144. 97.  Mathew, Political Beethoven, 66. 98.  Marx, “China—­chinesische Musik,” 204. 99.  For an explanation of the “cunning of reason” see Taylor, Hegel, 392–­93. 100.  Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. 101.  Quoted in Cai and Melvin, Beethoven in China, 36. 102.  Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 153.

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103.  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. 104.  Buck-­Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. 105.  Buck-­Morss, 87–­88. 106.  Buck-­Morss, 89–­90. 107.  Burnham, Beethoven Hero; Mathew, Political Beethoven; Sheehy, “Music Analy­­ sis as a Practice of the Self.” 108.  Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” 93. 109.  Johnson, “Music in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” 153. 110.  On “incarnation” see Dames, “On Hegel, History, and Reading,” and Taylor, Hegel, 197–­213. 111.  Many of those who wrote the rules of the emerging disciplines of musicology and later ethnomusicology shared this perspective. Vanessa Agnew describes a parallel case in “Listening to Others.” Epilogue 1.  “A larger group of soldiers than ever before stood armed on the riverbank and saluted the embassy with salvos and music.” Hüttner, Nachricht, 150. 2.  Hüttner, 146–­47. 3.  Barrow, Travels in China, 609. 4.  Alexander, Costume of China, n.p. 5.  Downing, Fan-­Qui in China, 2:131. 6.  Macartney, Embassy to China, 203. 7.  Macartney, 203–­4. 8.  Macartney, 204. 9.  Hüttner, Nachricht, 181. 10.  Burney, “Chinese Music.” 11.  See chapter 1 above. 12.  For an assessment of Davis’s contribution to “romantic sinology” see Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 106–­25. 13.  Davis, Chinese, 178. See also Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 29. 14.  Davis, Chinese, 178. 15.  Davis, 179. 16.  Davis, Poetry of the Chinese, 61. 17.  Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 115. 18.  Davis, Chinese, 255. The source of Davis’s quotation is the passage in Staunton’s Authentic Account that lists the answers to Burney’s catalog of questions. See chapter 5 above. 19.  Davis, 256. 20.  Goldman, Opera and the City, 114. 21.  Anderson, Narrative of the British Embassy, 259. 22.  There is no mention of the band in the factory’s official diary or consultations for the period 1793–­94: British Library Asia Office IOR/G/12/106–­7. 23.  Bickers, Scramble for China, 1–­50. 24.  Marshall, “Britain and China.”

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Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abacus, 69 Abbott, Jacob, 63, 80 Abel, Clarke, 69 Académie des inscriptions et belles-­lettres, 34, 90, 93 Academy of Ancient Music, 94 acoustics, 27 actors. See drama, sung; musical theater; theater, Chinese Adler, Guido, 20 Admiralty, 74, 94, 95. See also navy Adventure (ship), 94 aesthetics, 11, 28, 30, 37, 40, 44, 60, 125, 131, 152, 158, 169, 171 Africa, 6, 7, 124, 166, 180, 199 Agnew, Vanessa, 26, 88, 94–­95, 155, 160 airs. See song Alexander, William, 116–­17, 124, 128, 130, 183, 184 alphabetism, 23 Americas: North America, 13, 16, 32, 53, 54, 58, 63, 66, 79, 81, 82–­83, 166 (see also Native American peoples); South America, 20, 73, 186, 202 Amherst, 1st Baron ( Jeffery Amherst), 69 Amiot, Jean-­Joseph-­Marie, 33–­40, 43, 48–­50, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 121, 136, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 156, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 174, 185, 187, 191, 193, 197; Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que

modernes, 36–­37, 38–­39, 46, 91, 140, 146, 151, 152, 160, 163, 165, 170, 172 anchorages, 57, 58, 60, 61, 74, 79, 83 ancient music, 31, 49, 74, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95–­ 96, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156, 157, 163, 168, 175. See also Academy of Ancient Music; classicism “ancients and moderns,” 90, 156, 157 Anderson, Aeneas, 111, 113, 118, 119, 120, 182, 188 anthropology, “new,” 27, 28, 30, 40, 43, 44, 50, 51 antiquarianism, 89, 94, 96, 99, 114, 170. See also classicism; Society of Antiquaries Appadurai, Arjun, 10 Applegate, Celia, 159, 160–­61, 172–­73, 174 Aravamudan, Srinavas, 14, 15 architecture, 10, 125 archives, 8–­14, 53, 55, 60, 73, 79, 80, 83, 89, 90, 95, 102, 136, 187, 188 Arhats Crossing the Sea, 135 aristocracy. See class Aristophanes, 115 Aristotle, 30, 33, 34 army, 78, 118, 124, 127, 158, 183, 190 Arnaud, François, 35, 90–­94, 96, 104, 145–­46, 156, 157, 160, 163, 167, 170 artillery, 117, 118, 120, 124. See also army; bands arts, 40, 42, 45, 51, 87, 89, 91, 92, 116, 138, 145, 148, 157, 164, 170, 172

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Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas, 134, 135 Asiatisches Magazin, 71, 72 astronomy, 34, 123. See also science atheism, 35, 48 Atlantic Ocean, 12, 112 Attali, Jacques, 85 “aural flaneur,” 10 aurality, 11 Australia, 94 Austria, 168. See also Vienna automata, musical, 132. See also musical clocks autonomy, 178 Babel, 67, 73, 85. See also polyglotism Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 107, 121, 171, 172, 193 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 159, 173, 194 bamboo, 68, 69, 102, 154, 166 bands, 58, 71, 76, 102; Lord Macartney’s, 109, 113, 116, 117, 120–­27, 129–­31, 133, 138, 139, 140, 147, 154, 188, 198; maritime, 55–­57, 58, 59, 60, 79, 86; military, 7, 57, 116, 117, 136, 137, 140, 153–­54, 182; wind, 3, 57. See also chamber music Bank of England, 76, 100, 118 Banks, Joseph, 94, 139 banquets, 72, 73, 84, 196. See also meals barber’s tweezers, 118, 119 Barrow, John, 3, 102, 110, 115–­16, 116, 118, 124, 136–­37, 138, 151, 182, 183, 187, 192 bassoon, 123, 153 bass viol, 74, 76 Bavarian State Library, 55, 70 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 26, 52, 132, 159, 173, 177, 179, 181, 195, 197, 198; “lack of ” Chinese equivalent, 18, 106, 197 Begalee, 67 beggars, 3, 69, 70, 79, 84, 85, 182, 192 Beggar’s Opera, 96, 119 Beijing, 3, 9, 10, 14, 26, 34, 36, 38, 40, 49, 69, 90, 93, 100, 102, 111, 112, 116, 118–­19, 120, 121, 122, 124, 132, 136, 137, 142, 144, 155, 157, 164, 178–­79, 182, 192; imperial court, 7, 8, 22, 49, 50, 101, 117, 120, 133, 136, 147, 150, 157, 183, 185; missionary community, 18, 22, 31, 36, 70, 90, 103, 109, 121, 150, 156 (see also Christian missionaries) bells, 3, 6, 58, 59, 73, 81–­82, 83, 84, 113, 129, 141

Berlin, 47, 173, 196. See also Germany Berlin, Isaiah, 44 Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 173, 174 Bertin, Henri, 91 Bible, 66, 92, 131, 137, 181, 192 binli, 127, 128. See also guest ritual birdsong, 166–­67, 177 Blavet, Michel, 39, 146 Bloechl, Olivia, 12–­13, 20, 21 boatmen, 113, 114–­15, 137, 138, 182. See also sailors; work songs boats, small, 55, 58, 115, 182. See also ships Bohlman, Philip, 20, 44 Bombay, 74. See also India Born, Georgina, 22, 23 bosun, 81 botany, 6, 61, 94, 110, 111. See also plants, Chinese Bougainville, Jean-­Pierre de, 34–­35, 91 bourgeoisie. See class Boutin, Aimee, 10 Boxer Rebellion, 14 boxing, 55, 82, 83, 84 Bray, Francesca, 195 Britain, 2–­7, 14–­15, 17, 20, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 66, 73, 74, 76, 78, 87–­88, 89, 94, 109, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 135, 137, 138, 140, 147, 156, 158, 173, 183, 185, 188, 189, 190, 192, 194, 196. See also England British Empire, 124, 139, 189 brothels. See flower boats; prostitution Buck-­Morss, Susan, 179, 180, 199 Buddhism, 125, 132, 136 Buford, Robert, 63 Burke, Edmund, 60, 84, 129, 131 Burney, Charles, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 24, 43, 74, 75, 76, 87–­108, 97, 109, 110, 111, 121–­23, 132, 139–­58, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197; General History of Music, 4, 46, 74, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103–­8, 140, 145, 147, 151, 158; Italian Tour, 94, 95 Burney, Fanny, 102, 139, 144, 147 Burney, James, 88, 94, 95, 110, 147 Burnham, Scott, 179, 181, 195, 198 business, 12, 46, 53, 57, 61, 66, 67, 72, 73, 78, 84, 85. See also commerce; shops; trade

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cadet, 59 Cai Yuanpei, 178–­79 Calcutta, 74 call and response, 116 Calzabigi, Luigi, 38, 49, 185 Canada, 41 Cannadine, David, 127 cannons, 124 cannon salute, 1, 58, 113, 117, 118, 124, 190 canons, 23, 28, 152, 159, 180, 181, 193, 194, 197, 198 Canton, 3, 8, 11, 16, 53–­86, 65, 68, 87, 95, 99, 102, 110, 111, 117, 124, 143, 144, 153, 155, 157, 182–­83, 188, 189, 191–­92, 193; listening in, 53–­86, 96, 98, 118; Western factories in, 6, 55, 63–­68, 64, 73–­74, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 114, 182, 186, 188, 192; workforce, maritime, 8, 83, 100, 192. See also Whampoa Cantonese, 71 Canton opera, 71, 83. See also opera Canton River, 56. See also Pearl River “Canton System,” 1, 5, 7, 16, 23, 53, 54, 67, 69, 84, 85, 187, 190. See also trade capitalism, 7, 15, 69. See also globalization captains, 57, 115, 137. See also sailors cargo, 81, 83, 112, 119, 123 Caribbean, 13, 20, 124, 180 carillon, 140 Carroll, John, 53 Cartesianism, 35 castrati, 134, 150, 157 Catholicism, 22, 26, 70, 87, 132, 168. See also Jesuits cello, 74, 76 Celts, 155, 177 ceremony, 37, 58, 71, 80, 99, 113, 117, 118, 124, 125–­28, 129, 136, 138, 177, 183, 190 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 16–­17 chamber music, 66, 67, 84. See also bands; music, Western Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, 144 chant, 132 Charlotte, Queen, 121, 123 Chen, Jeng-­guo, 138 Chen, Kuan-­Hsing, 14, 198–­99 Chengde. See Jehol Cheng-­Jui, 117 Chinese organ, 97, 98. See also organ (instrument)

253

Chinnery, George, 5 chinoiserie, 5, 115 chorales. See hymns chords. See harmony Christensen, Thomas, 35 Christianity, 28, 35, 48, 66, 84, 117, 165, 168, 174, 175, 176. See also salvation Christian missionaries, 18, 20, 22, 26, 31, 36, 44, 51, 54, 66, 70, 71, 78, 79, 81, 87, 101, 103, 121, 123, 136, 150, 151, 156, 157, 164, 168, 195. See also Beijing: missionary community church services, 67, 81–­82, 84, 168 Chusan, 111 cityscape, 10 civilization. See culture clapper, 70, 76 clarinet, 123 class, 78–­83, 111, 192; middle, 73, 79, 90, 115, 141; upper, 54, 74, 81, 141, 146, 174 (see also gentlemen); working, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 137, 168 (see also subaltern voices) classicism, 34, 110, 115, 170, 195. See also ancient music; antiquarianism Clement XI (pope), 26 Cohen, David, 35 Cohong, 57, 72. See also hong merchants Colley, Linda, 111 colonial desire, 13, 17, 21, 39, 54, 58, 89, 161, 180, 192, 196 colonialism, Western, 12–­13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 39, 53, 54, 58, 89, 161, 198; British, 17, 20. See also imperialism: Western comedians, 71, 183, 184 commerce, 57, 59, 115, 138, 182, 189 composers, 17, 18, 26, 31, 32, 38, 195 compradors, 80 concerts, 66, 121, 122, 123, 137, 140, 154, 197, 198 concubines. See prostitution Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 32 Confucianism, 26, 32–­36, 125, 136, 150, 157, 165; neo-­, 33, 35 Conrad, Sebastian, 3, 15, 25, 196 “contact zones,” 6, 53; opera in, 182–­88; soundscapes in, 53–­86 Cook, James, 88, 94, 110, 147, 156, 160 Cook, Nicholas, 22, 23 Corbin, Alain, 10 cornet, 137

254

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corps sonore, 23, 32–­40, 48, 191, 194 cosmopolitanism, 26, 27, 157, 164, 171, 174, 175, 178 counterpoint. See polyphony court, imperial. See under Beijing; Qing dynasty courtesans. See prostitution crackers, 59, 60, 61, 69, 190. See also firecrackers Crewe, Frances Greville, 139–­40 cross-­dressing, 72, 73 crowds, 3, 8, 61, 63–­65, 68, 84, 85, 115, 118–­19, 127 culture, 1, 27, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 78, 105, 116, 127, 146, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 169, 171, 174, 177, 194, 198; Chinese, 5, 17, 21, 27, 44, 45, 47, 109, 136, 146, 157, 178, 186, 194, 195, 198 custom, 1, 27, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 78 Cyclopaedia. See Rees, Abraham, Cyclopaedia d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 32–­33, 35 Dana, Richard Henry, 81, 82, 83 dance, 32, 37, 38, 55, 82, 83, 84, 117, 132, 134, 186 Dane’s Island, 57, 58. See also Denmark Daniell, William, 65 Daodejing, 101 Darnton, Robert, 90 Davis, John Francis, 186–­88, 189 Davy, Charles, 103 deimperialization, 196–­99 Denmark, 57, 58, 66, 67, 71. See also Dane’s Island Dent, Lancelot, 78, 80, 81, 189, 190 Descartes, René, 35 despotism, 43, 45, 47, 109, 131, 165 dialectics, 173, 175, 176, 177, 180 Diderot, Denis, 32 difference: cultural, 28, 48, 51, 52, 192; racial, 27, 192, 197; sounds of, 54, 84, 85 Dinwiddie, James, 117, 119 diplomacy, 7, 9, 10, 20, 39, 54, 134, 135, 139, 188, 189, 198. See also Macartney Embassy dirge, 118, 119. See also funerals Discovery (ship), 94 disease, 58, 118, 188, 189 docklands. See ports doctors, 3, 6, 54, 68, 74, 76, 95, 156

Dolan, Emily, 122–­23 Downing, Charles Toogood, 3, 8, 54, 55–­57, 58, 59–­63, 69, 71–­72, 79, 84, 85, 86, 183, 188, 191–­92 Downs, Jacques, 80 drama, sung, 7, 96, 99, 132–­36, 141, 143, 187. See also musical theater; opera; theater, Chinese drawings, 6, 56, 110–­11, 123, 128, 151, 182, 183. See also paintings drums, 58, 60, 61, 69, 112, 116, 124, 129, 142, 153, 186 drunkenness, 63, 80 Du Halde, Jean-­Baptiste, 34, 42, 99, 104, 144–­45 Duke of  York’s March, 124 dulcimer, hammered, 93. See also sticado Dundas, Henry, 110, 120 Eades, Henry, 118 ear, 44, 48, 50, 98, 106, 148, 151, 152, 158; aurality, 11; “big ears,” 44–­48; “imperial ears,” 5–­8, 21, 54, 59, 83–­86, 89, 192, 196, 199 (see also “imperial eyes”); “universal,” 2, 39; Western, 5, 7, 14, 20, 26, 199 earplugs, 72, 84, 85, 196, 199 earwitnesses, 54, 80, 83–­86, 111, 115, 137, 138, 188 East India Company, 56, 66, 67, 70, 74, 81, 99, 121, 122, 139, 140, 156, 188, 189; ships, 9–­10, 55, 80, 95 Egypt, 28, 29, 30, 33, 36–­39, 46, 91, 97, 105, 146, 149, 150, 156, 192. See also hieroglyphs 1800, around: history, 11, 17, 19, 20, 21, 80, 191, 195–­96; music, 2–­11, 16, 20, 23, 27, 51, 52, 87, 88, 159, 191, 195, 198, 199; science, 194–­ 95; sound, 53, 61, 190, 196, 198; theater, 188 Einfalt. See simplicity elites, 18, 26, 29, 34, 66, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 81, 84, 89, 122, 163, 196 Elvin, Mark, 195 emperors. See Qing emperors empiricism, 24, 30, 34, 35, 46, 88, 102, 110, 145, 147, 148 Encyclopedists, 27, 35 England, 5, 47, 63, 66, 73, 76, 78, 81, 90, 92, 94, 100, 102, 111, 112, 125, 134, 135, 136, 139–­40, 170, 183, 188. See also Britain; London

i ndex

Enlightenment, 2, 3, 10, 14, 20, 21, 37, 50; China’s “lack of,” 47; Chinese contribution to, 48; French, 34, 40; German, 27, 29, 30–­31, 44, 51; global, 3, 25–­28, 31; in music, 26, 31, 37, 39, 48; thought, 21, 35, 90 ensembles. See bands; chamber music entertainment, 73, 122, 132, 134, 151, 153, 174, 183, 188 erhu, 76, 77, 102, 142 Erlmann, Veit, 10 essentialism. See racism ethics. See morality ethnography, 20, 22, 24, 28, 187, 198. See also ethnomusicology ethnomusicology, 1, 8, 10–­11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. See also ethnography; folk music; vernacular musics Eton College, 76 eunuchs, 134, 150, 157 Eurocentrism, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 157, 162, 171, 175, 198; in music, 23 exoticism, 13, 14, 42, 68, 107, 115, 118 eyes. See “imperial eyes” factories. See Canton: Western factories in “failure narrative,” 18–­19 falsetto, 3, 8, 60, 72–­73, 83, 99, 143, 153 feedback loops, 16, 25, 197 festivals, 8, 60, 61, 83, 190. See also ceremony; religion Fétis, François-­Joseph, 196–­97 fiddle, 74, 81, 82, 101, 102 fife, 98, 116, 118, 124 fighting, 55, 82, 83, 84 finance, 10, 118, 138. See also commerce Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm, 172 firecrackers, 59, 60, 61, 69, 190 fireworks, 3, 6, 8, 61, 85, 113, 132 First Opium War. See under Opium Wars flower boats, 63, 84, 182. See also prostitution flute, 39, 74, 98, 99, 102, 113, 117, 121, 123, 137, 142, 175, 186 folklore, 17, 20, 21, 22, 177, 179, 181, 187, 194, 196, 197 folk music, 21, 28, 41, 50, 51, 70, 105, 142–­43, 155, 176, 178. See also vernacular musics Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 151 Forêt, Philippe, 125, 135, 138

255

Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 4, 5, 11, 20, 21, 24, 43, 91, 159–­82, 194, 195; Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 4, 165–­66, 167; Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland, 91, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171, 193; plagiarism, 91, 160, 162, 163–­64, 167, 168, 169, 178, 193 Fox, Charles James, 139 France, 20, 27, 30–­40, 43, 47, 71, 87, 88, 89–­94, 101, 103, 109, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 155, 156, 159, 164, 165, 170, 192, 193. See also Paris Franklin, Benjamin, 105 Frederick II, the Great, 35, 169, 172 freedom, 162, 174, 178, 179, 180–­81 free trade, 2, 7, 16, 19, 53, 158, 189 Friedrich Wilhelm (king), 29 fundamental bass, 32, 34 funerals, 58, 81–­82, 83, 99, 109, 118, 119, 190. See also dirge gamut (division of octave), 93, 101, 141. See also octave gardens, 5, 6, 119, 125, 128, 129, 134, 135, 171 Garrick, David, 90 gaze, Western, 21, 69. See also “imperial eyes”; sentimentalization, imperial Gelbart, Matthew, 40, 105, 155 gentlemen, 45, 61, 66, 74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 99, 117, 121, 124, 127, 154, 188. See also class geography, 8, 47, 50, 125 George III (king), 76, 121, 123, 127, 138, 185 Germany, 4, 10, 30, 31, 44, 47, 48, 51, 61, 67, 71, 80, 82, 89, 95, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 122, 131, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144, 156, 159–­82; as imagined community, 161. See also Berlin; Göttingen; Halle Gibbon, Edward, 104 Ginguené, Pierre-­Louis, 145 global history. See under history globalization, 15, 69, 83, 115, 116, 120, 124, 156, 157, 158, 162, 194, 197 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 38, 49, 93, 121, 156, 170, 172, 185–­86. See also Cal­ zabigi, Luigi; “reform opera” Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 170, 172 Goldman, Andrea, 134 Goldsmith, Oliver, 168 gong, 1, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 73, 102, 112, 113, 127, 134, 137, 142, 145, 153, 183, 190

256

i ndex

gongche notation, 99, 152 Gordon, Bonnie, 10 Gothic, 106, 147 Göttingen, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165 Göttinger Hain, 162, 169, 172 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 30 government. See Qing dynasty: politics and government Gramit, David, 159 Grammont, Jean-­Joseph de, 101, 121, 122, 142, 149, 156 Grand Canal, 9, 116 Grand Sacrifice program, 134 “Grand Tour,” 25, 89, 110, 111 Gray, John, 140 “great divergence,” 195 Great Wall of China, 109, 112, 119, 124, 136 Greece, 29, 30, 36, 45, 91, 103, 104, 105, 114–­15, 116, 141, 146, 148, 149, 150, 156, 158, 170, 175 Gregor, Neil, 9 Greville, Fulke, 139 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, 39–­40 Guangzhou. See Canton guest ritual, 188. See also protocol rite Guignes, Joseph de, 36 “gunboat diplomacy.” See violence, Western Gungang. See gong gunpowder, 60, 156 Hahn, Philipp Matthäus, 122–­23 Hai River, 112, 113, 115, 187 Haiti, 199 Halle, 28, 29, 35, 165, 176, 179 Hamilton, William, 139 Handel, George Frideric, 128, 131, 154, 173, 192 Hanlin Academy, 34 Hapsburg Empire, 168, 169 harbors. See ports harmony, 24, 32, 34, 35, 36–­38, 40, 42, 48, 60, 91, 92, 95, 96, 106, 107, 115, 129, 140, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154–­55, 156, 158, 164, 166, 167, 170, 178, 191, 192–­93 harp, 137 Harpe, Jean-­François de la, 93 harpsichord, 50, 121, 142 hautboy, 154 Hawkesworth, John, 94

Hawkins, John, 95, 105 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 26, 52, 74, 107, 121, 131, 132, 173 Hayot, Eric, 1, 2, 4, 69 hearing. See listening Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 160, 161, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 199; World Spirit, 5, 10, 24, 160, 174, 177, 178, 181 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27–­28, 44–­48, 50–­ 51, 106, 166, 170, 197; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 44–­48; “Mongolian” peoples, 45, 46; phonocentrism, 47 hermeneutics, 9, 24 Hevia, James, 109, 137, 138 H. Fisher Son and Company, 57 Hickey, William, 73, 85, 113, 117 hieroglyphs, 36, 46. See also Egypt Hindustan (ship), 112 historicism, 15–­17, 179 history, 1, 8, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 51, 92, 174, 175, 176, 179, 181, 197; Chinese, 18, 19, 44–­45, 156, 175, 186, 195, 197, 198; global, 4, 15, 16, 17, 20–­28, 50, 52, 88, 92, 94, 96, 155, 157, 160, 163, 177, 194, 195–­96; “musical turn,” 9; “new cultural,” 9, 13; of the world, 160, 161, 162, 171, 173, 180, 181, 193 Hogarth, William, 85, 118, 192 Holmes, Samuel, 111, 124–­25, 127, 182 Holy Roman Empire, 29, 160, 163, 168, 169, 174 Honam Island, 63 Hong Kong, 186 hong merchants, 67, 72, 73, 79, 84, 85, 182, 186, 188, 196. See also Cohong; merchants hoppo, 58, 80, 120 horn, French, 123, 154 Horsburgh, James, 56 Huang-­pu. See Whampoa Huc, Évariste Régis, 71 humiliation, Chinese, 14, 18, 19 humor, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 79, 118 Hunter, William C., 63, 67, 79 Hüttner, John Christian, 111, 113, 114, 115, 121, 123–­24, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141–­42, 143, 144, 145, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 172, 182, 185–­86, 187, 192 hymns, 66–­67, 84, 85–­86, 127, 128, 140, 141, 154

i ndex

idealism. See philosophy, Western “imperial ears.” See under ear “imperial eyes,” 21, 54, 58, 84–­85 Imperial Gardens. See Yuanmingyuan Imperial Household Agency, 133 imperialism: Japanese, 14, 18; Western, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 53, 54, 58, 83–­ 86, 89, 156, 158, 161, 162, 180, 181, 188–­99. See also colonialism, Western India, 16, 23, 78, 110, 137, 156, 159, 175, 186, 189. See also Bombay Indiaman, 55, 81, 82, 112 Indian Ocean, 55, 63, 112, 192 “Indians,” Native American, 12–­13, 32, 166 inspectors, 58, 80, 120 instrumental music. See under music, Western instruments, 37, 50, 57, 72, 97, 102, 121, 122, 123, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 151, 152, 154, 166, 168, 186; Chinese, 69, 76, 90, 93, 101–­4, 103, 141, 142, 143, 152, 155, 168, 177 intellectual history, 15, 21, 23, 25–­26, 31 Ireland, 97 Irving, David, 26, 94–­95, 155 Italy, 40, 89–­90, 92, 94, 100, 108, 117, 147, 150, 156, 158, 159, 173, 176, 178, 186, 194. See also Naples; Rome “Jack Tar,” 63 Japan, 14, 18, 19 Jehol, 109, 112, 118, 120, 124–­36, 126, 138, 141, 154, 183, 188 Jesuits, 26, 28, 33, 34, 42, 46, 87, 90, 91, 101, 121, 142, 164, 165. See also Catholicism Jew’s harp, 118, 119 Johnson, David, 71 Johnson, James, 61, 68, 69, 80 Johnson, Samuel, 89, 139 Joseph II, 168–­69, 172 Journal der Moden, 113, 114, 115 Judaism, 54, 81, 118, 137, 138, 161, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 194 junks, 59, 60, 96, 114. See also ships Kambra, Karl, 115 Kangxi (emperor), 15, 18, 34, 167, 168–­69, 172 Kant, Immanuel, 47, 173, 178 kettle-­drums. See drums

257

keyboard, 39, 113, 115, 143, 171. See also carillon; harpsichord; piano Khan, Genghis, 44 Kitson, Peter, 187 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 169, 170, 172 Klotz, Sebastian, 32 kowtow, 109, 117, 125, 129, 131, 137 Kramer, Richard, 171 kunqu style, 133 La Borde, Jean-­Benjamin de, 145–­46, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–­69 Lampe, Evan, 80 Landon, H. C. Robbins, 132 landscape, 5, 10, 59, 60, 86, 125, 127, 135, 138 Lange, Joachim, 29 language, 12, 20, 44, 45, 47, 67, 70, 111, 131, 153, 166, 185, 186, 195 lascars, 63, 67, 79, 80 law, 47, 67, 125, 137, 162, 173, 187 leisure, 66, 73, 74, 83 Leppert, Richard, 10, 83 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 48, 170, 171, 172, 193–­94 Levitz, Tamara, 24 libraries. See archives Lieder. See song Lifschitz, Avi, 2 Li Guangdi, 33, 34, 35, 49, 91 Lind, James, 74, 75, 76, 78, 85, 94–­99, 97, 100, 103, 104–­5, 140, 151, 152, 155, 187–­88, 191 Lindorff, Joyce, 18, 121, 140 Ling-­lun, 166–­67 linguistics. See language Lin Zexu, 190 Lion (ship), 112 listening: in Canton, 53–­86, 190; Chinese, 15, 19, 50, 51, 52, 124, 137, 147, 148, 155, 171, 185, 186–­87, 191, 193, 198; in Jehol, 124–­32; practice of, 8, 11, 18, 28, 40, 49, 51, 52, 58, 87, 106–­8, 110, 131, 151–­52, 161, 169, 196; Western, 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 23, 51, 52, 54, 55, 79, 89, 115, 132, 137, 138, 142, 143, 155–­82, 187, 190–­96, 198 literacy, 21, 99 Literary Club, 139 literature, 87, 90, 111, 134, 144, 168, 169, 170, 172, 186

258

i ndex

London, 3, 10, 55, 61, 69, 70, 79, 85, 93, 95, 100, 102, 109, 110, 115, 118, 120, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140, 144, 146, 185, 186–­87, 188, 189, 191–­92. See also England Lonsdale, Roger, 95 Louis XV (king), 32 Lowther, James, 125 lü, 33–­34, 37, 177. See also octave lute, 84, 102, 148, 182. See also pipa Lutheranism, 48, 54, 128 Lütteken, Laurenz, 31 Macao, 55, 66, 70, 73, 85, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192 Macartney, 1st Earl of (George Macartney), 7, 79, 88, 109–­38, 128, 130, 139–­44, 145, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 182–­84, 187, 188–­89, 193 Macartney Embassy, 6, 7, 10, 16, 39, 88, 98, 101, 102, 109–­38, 112, 130, 139–­44, 145, 146, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 182–­83, 185, 187, 188–­89, 192, 193, 197 Malacca, 66 Malay, 63, 67 Malebranche, Nicolas, 35 Manchuria, 45, 51, 58, 111, 117, 125, 127, 136, 168 mandarins, 48, 49, 92, 116, 123, 124, 153, 169–­ 70, 171, 183, 194 manners, 47, 61 manufacturing, 109–­10, 120, 122, 140, 157 Maori. See New Zealand maps, 56, 65, 112 marches, 119, 124, 125 Maria Theresa, 168, 169 marriages, 99 Marshall, P. J., 110 Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17, 20, 24, 159–­82, 187, 194–­99 Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 161 mathematics, 18, 34 Mathew, Nicholas, 131, 177 May Fourth Movement, 18, 197, 198 meals, 73, 78, 84, 182. See also banquets mechanics, 118, 122, 124, 140, 144, 156 media, 10, 38, 50, 61, 159 Meiners, Christoph, 165 melody, 24, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 46, 83, 92, 95, 96, 97, 97, 99, 102, 104–­8, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 127, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 164, 166, 170, 187

Melville, Herman, 61 memoirs, 6, 53, 54, 55, 59, 78, 79, 81, 111, 116, 123–­24, 129, 134, 140, 141–­42, 144, 146, 147, 152, 163, 165, 167, 183, 185 memorative signs, 41, 42, 43 Mendelssohn, Felix, 173 Mendelssohn, Moses, 47, 48, 170 merchants, 81, 182. See also hong merchants; trade meter, 143 Meyen, Franz Julius, 61, 68, 72, 78 middle class, 73, 79, 90, 115, 141 military. See army; artillery; bands Milton, John, 131, 137 missionaries. See Christian missionaries modernity, 162, 197; Chinese, 18, 19, 26, 30; Western, 1, 10, 19, 21, 25, 26, 193 Mokyr, Joel, 195 monarchy, 32, 47, 90, 91, 102, 120, 121, 123, 127, 137, 138, 149, 168–­69, 172, 185 Mongolia, 125 monody, 4–­5, 42. See also polyphony Montagu, John (4th Earl of Sandwich), 74, 94, 95, 104 Montesquieu, Charles-­Louis de, 43, 47, 168 mora, 63 morality, 28, 29, 30–­31, 35, 37, 41, 44, 47, 149, 165, 191 mores, 47 Mornington, Earl of (Garret Wesley), 97 Morrison, Robert, 66–­67, 70, 85–­86 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 26, 52, 121, 173, 198 Munich, University of, 70–­71 music, Chinese, 34, 36–­37, 38, 40, 41–­42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 54, 60–­61, 63, 70–­72, 74, 76, 97, 98–­108, 111, 114, 121, 136, 139, 140, 144–­45, 147–­48, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155–­58, 159, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173–­78, 180, 181, 187, 191–­94, 197, 198; ceremonial, 7, 8, 37, 113, 127, 129 (see also ceremony; festivals); lü, 33–­34, 37, 177 (see also octave); Western appreciation of, 74, 76, 78, 84, 87, 88, 91–­99, 114, 141, 154, 172, 174–­75, 177, 191, 192, 196; Western dismissal of, 39, 61, 69, 71–­72, 84, 106, 134, 147, 157, 160, 183, 191, 192, 196; in the Western imagination, 4, 9, 11, 16, 21, 22–­23, 31, 42, 51, 54, 68, 84, 90, 155, 191

i ndex

music, Western, 30–­31, 39, 40, 66, 76, 86, 96, 137, 155, 157, 168, 180, 181, 187, 191, 194, 196; Chinese indifference to, 39, 49, 124, 140, 146, 151–­52, 169, 194; as Chinese “offshoot,” 15, 18, 19, 49; criticism, 38, 52, 163, 167, 169–­70, 171, 173; domestic, 66, 74; exceptionalism narrative, 13, 18, 21, 24, 26, 32, 42, 51, 89, 106, 122, 140, 147, 180, 191, 196, 197, 198; German, 159–­62, 172, 173, 176, 178–­82; “heroic” narratives, 181, 195; insecurity of, 4; instrumental music, 31, 32, 51, 66, 83, 123, 146, 168, 185; non-­ Western sounds in, 13, 20; published, 31; telos, 16, 17, 196; as “universal,” 2–­3, 19, 22, 37, 38, 39, 91. See also chamber music musical clocks, 119, 122 musical theater, 1, 8, 96, 132–­36, 143, 146, 153, 168, 183, 185–­87, 197. See also drama, sung; theater, Chinese music history, 2, 5, 15, 16, 20, 21, 24, 31, 89, 95, 96, 99, 104, 105, 106, 145–­46, 147–­48, 149, 152, 156, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 173–­81, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198; Chinese, 17, 20, 21, 22–­ 23, 88–­89, 96, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 160, 161, 163, 164–­67, 177, 181, 194, 197 musicking, 8, 16, 28, 31, 48, 55, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 89, 93, 102, 122, 137, 138, 144, 147–­48, 154, 155, 157, 168, 169, 174, 187, 191, 197, 198 musicology, 1, 8, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 162, 198; “decolonization” of, 11; historicist, 17; “new,” 9, 13, 21, 51 music theory, 9, 24, 27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 40, 93, 95, 96, 103, 104, 105, 106, 148, 155, 165, 166, 167, 181, 193, 196–­97; Chinese, 37, 40, 43, 91, 93, 96, 98, 101, 104, 105, 107, 140, 141–­ 42, 143, 148, 149, 150, 152–­53, 164, 169, 177 Musikwissenschaft, 20 naamyam, 76, 191 Nanjing, 143, 153, 183, 185. See also Treaty of Nanking Napier, Lord John, 189–­90 Naples, 146 Napoleon, 144, 174 nation, 28, 44, 47, 79, 110, 127, 138, 148, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 194 nationalism, 44, 159, 162

259

nations, tributary, 127, 132–­33, 134 Native American peoples, 12–­13, 32, 166 naturalists, 54, 72, 94, 139 natural law, 30, 191 nature, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40–­41, 58, 59, 106, 131, 147, 149, 150, 153, 165, 166, 175, 177, 191 navy, 54, 61, 68, 73, 74, 78, 81, 94, 112. See also Admiralty; officers Nebuchadnezzar, 131, 137 “Needham puzzle,” 194–­95 Nemesis (ship), 190 Neoplatonism, 30, 149. See also Plato networks, 25, 26, 34, 49, 50, 51, 156, 157, 164 Neue teutsche Merkur, 128 Neumann, Karl Friedrich, 54–­55, 70, 71, 73, 78, 80–­81, 82, 85, 188, 189, 192 Newtonianism, 34, 35 New Zealand, 94, 95, 160 Nicol, John, 80 ninefold prostration. See kowtow noise, 6, 7, 17, 21, 51, 58, 59–­61, 63–­65, 72, 84, 118, 138, 154, 165, 167, 183, 185, 187, 189–­90, 196 nomadism, 45, 46, 125, 127 North America. See under Americas nostalgia. See sentimentalization, imperial notation, 42, 43, 70, 96, 97, 99, 106, 115, 116, 143, 151, 152, 154, 175, 177. See also gongche notation “Nouvelles réflexions” (Code de musique pratique). See Rameau, Jean-­Philippe: Code de musique pratique oboe, 154 occasionalism, 35 Ochoa Gaultier, Ana María, 6–­7, 10–­11, 20 octave, 33–­34, 37, 91, 93, 97, 121, 148, 152, 164, 166, 169. See also gamut (division of octave) officers, 58, 61, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 83, 94, 110, 111, 136, 183. See also navy officials, 61, 70, 74, 76, 79, 85, 117–­18, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 135, 147, 150, 169, 182, 188. See also trade “Old Canton.” See “Canton System” Old China Street, 79 Old Summer Palace. See Yuanmingyuan Omai, 147 opera, 140, 146; Chinese, 8, 71, 72, 83, 84, 85, 133, 143, 153, 183, 185, 188, 192, 196 (see also

260

i ndex

opera (cont.) Canton opera; theater, Chinese); in the “contact zone,” 182–­88; Western, 3, 31, 32, 38, 40, 42, 82, 146, 147, 156, 170, 173, 176, 178, 186, 194 (see also theater, Western). See also drama, sung; musical theater; “reform opera” opium, 4, 16, 53, 78, 110, 189, 190 Opium Wars, 188, 198; First, 2, 5, 7, 11–­12, 13–­14, 15, 53, 190; Second, 11–­12, 14 oratorios, 131, 132 orchestras, 132, 137, 138, 177 organ (instrument), 87, 102, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 152, 162, 175, 193. See also Chinese organ Orientalism, 9, 14, 84, 105, 176, 177, 178, 181, 187. See also Said, Edward Orpheus, 146, 155 orrery. See Weltmachine Osbeck, Pehr, 59, 65 Ossian, 46, 105, 170 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 26, 109, 129, 138, 162, 168, 171, 175 otherness, 2, 13, 22, 26, 27, 51, 79, 84, 116, 118, 168, 178, 180, 191, 192, 198 overtone series, 42 Pacific Ocean, 20, 55, 61 pagoda, 57, 57, 71 paintings, 6, 62, 63, 64, 68, 76, 77, 102, 110–­11, 113, 123, 126, 137, 138, 139, 170. See also drawings palaces, 9, 10, 14, 71, 109, 112, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 132, 134, 137, 138, 150, 188, 198 Pallas, Peter Simon, 46, 51 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount (Henry John Temple), 189, 190 pandemonium. See crowds pans, iron, 69 pantheism, 35 Paris, 10, 26, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 54, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 101, 104, 145, 146, 155, 156, 157, 163, 164, 167, 170. See also France Parsees, 63 patronage, 94, 139 “Pavilion of Pure Sounds,” 133–­34 Pearl River, 3, 8, 16, 53, 55, 60, 61–­63, 62, 80, 83, 84, 85, 182, 185, 190

Pederson, Sanna, 181 Pedrini, Teodorico, 15 Peking. See Beijing pentatonicism, 36, 46, 71, 95, 96, 97, 98, 104, 140, 155, 166, 176, 177 performance, 71, 72, 124, 132, 143, 182–­84, 188, 190; musical, 31, 37, 38, 74, 76, 83, 133, 146, 151, 152, 195 Persia, 32, 41, 63 perspective, 15, 16, 20, 24, 196, 197, 199. See also process Peyho River, 112, 113, 115, 187 philosophy, Chinese, 30, 146 philosophy, Western, 24, 27–­32, 35, 36, 40, 43, 44, 47–­50, 87, 90, 110, 131, 151, 165, 173, 178, 179, 180, 198, 199 phonocentrism, 47 physicians. See doctors piano, 30, 74, 113, 121, 142, 176, 187 Piccinni, Niccolò, 156, 170 picturesque, 58, 60 pidgin, 67, 84, 119 pierres sonores, 140, 142 Pietism, 29, 48 pipa, 8, 63, 142, 182. See also lute pipe (instrument), 81 Pitt, William, the Younger, 110, 120 plants, Chinese, 6. See also botany Plato, 33, 34. See also Neoplatonism plays, 72, 73, 75, 96, 98, 115, 139 pleasure boats, 63, 84, 182. See also prostitution Plutarch, 104, 105 poetry, 133, 162, 170, 171 politics. See under Qing dynasty polyglotism, 84. See also Babel Polynesia, 89, 160. See also Tonga polyphony, 4–­5, 24, 36, 38, 95, 96, 98, 107, 115, 140, 142, 147, 152, 156, 157, 158, 160, 166, 167, 178, 193. See also monody porcelain, 26 ports, 13–­14, 53, 58, 81, 82, 85, 115 Portugal, 67, 70, 74, 78, 190 positivism. See empiricism; science postcolonialism, 1, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 179, 196–­99 poverty, 69, 79, 85, 118, 138, 197 Pratt, Mary Louise, 6, 54, 59 “presence chamber,” 119, 123, 137

i ndex

Priestley, Joseph, 104 “primitive” music, 4, 16, 43, 76, 88–­89, 176, 181 prints, 6 process, 16, 20, 24, 157, 180, 196, 197, 199. See also perspective progress, Western, 4, 16, 24, 147–­48, 157, 167, 174, 179, 193 prostitution, 63, 73–­78, 84, 150, 182, 187–­88. See also flower boats Protestantism, 66, 154, 161, 175, 176 protocol rite, 127, 128. See also guest ritual provincialism, 4, 17, 25 Prussia, 29, 35, 54, 160, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180 Prussian State Library, 70 psaltery, 137 Pythagoras, 33, 34, 92, 148 Qianlong (emperor). See under Qing emperors qin, 63, 148 Qing dynasty, 12, 18–­19, 61, 71, 127, 150, 182, 184; imperial court, 26, 33, 34, 127, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 157, 172, 195; politics and government, 14, 18, 37, 60, 125, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 149, 157, 168, 169, 172, 183, 188, 189, 190, 195–­96 Qing emperors, 28–­29, 43, 93, 117, 119, 136, 150, 169; Kangxi, 15, 18, 34, 167, 168–­69, 172; Qianlong, 49–­50, 109, 112, 118–­37, 128, 130, 141, 144, 147, 154, 157, 183–­85, 192 qingyen ge, 133–­34 quarter-­master, 59 querelle des bouffons, 39–­44, 47, 92, 93, 148, 156, 159, 170 racism, 45, 46, 51, 63, 97, 106, 115, 160, 165, 180, 196–­97, 198 Rameau, Jean-­Philippe, 23, 27, 32–­36, 39, 40, 41–­42, 48–­50, 91, 101, 146, 156, 164, 191, 192, 197; Code de musique pratique, 33, 34, 38, 48–­49, 91; corps sonore, 23, 32–­40, 48, 191, 194; Les cyclopes, 39; Les Indes galants, 32; Les sauvages, 32, 39, 49; Traité de l’harmonie, 32 “Ranz des vaches,” 41, 42. See also folk music Raper, Matthew, Jr., 74, 76, 77, 78, 99–­103, 105, 121, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 191 rationalism, 27, 30, 35, 40, 41, 48, 50

261

rattles, 61, 84, 142 Rees, Abraham, Cyclopaedia, 87, 88, 90, 98, 99, 102, 111, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 150, 155, 185 reform, 18, 168, 169, 197 “reform opera,” 38, 49, 156 religion, 47, 175, 178; Chinese, 26, 28, 37, 60, 61, 73, 113, 125, 175, 177, 195. See also ceremony; Christianity; festivals; Judaism; temples republicanism, 47, 198 Reynolds, Jeremiah N., 61 Reynolds, Joshua, 121, 123, 138, 139 rice paddies, 58 Rites Controversy, 26, 33, 34 ritual, 47, 127, 128, 129, 132, 137, 138, 151, 157, 184, 188. See also guest ritual; protocol rite Rochlitz, Friedrich, 173 Rome, 26, 45, 104, 146, 154. See also Italy Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio, 173, 186 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 27, 28, 32, 39–­43, 44, 46–­47, 51, 92, 93, 106, 147, 148, 152, 156, 158, 193, 196; Dictionnaire de musique, 41, 42, 43, 50, 92, 104; Essay on the Origin of Languages, 41; and simplicity, 4–­5, 43, 50, 98, 156, 197 (see also simplicity); Social Contract, 43 Roussier, Pierre-­Joseph, 35, 36, 90, 91, 97, 101, 104, 145–­46, 148, 149, 152, 156, 157, 192 Royal Society, 76, 94, 99 Russia, 46, 51, 137 sackbut, 137 Said, Edward, 6, 9 sailors, 55, 59, 60, 67, 68, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 115, 116, 192. See also boatmen; captains salvation, 29 sampans, 59, 60 Sandwich, 4th Earl of ( John Montagu), 74, 94, 95, 104 scales. See music theory; pentatonicism Schilling, Gustav, 160, 174 Schlötzer, August Ludwig, 162, 163, 174 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 30 science, 8, 19, 33, 35, 40, 45–­46, 78, 87, 91, 99, 110, 117, 123, 138, 139, 145, 149, 151, 156, 157, 194. See also astronomy; empiricism; naturalists Scotland, 3, 46, 74, 80, 95–­99, 97, 100, 104–­5, 116, 117, 140, 155, 156, 170, 176, 177, 178, 189

262

i ndex

screaming, 69, 70, 71–­72, 73, 84, 153, 183, 190 seascape, 10 Second-­bar, 57 Second Opium War. See under Opium Wars sellers, 70, 71, 118, 119 semitones, 92, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 142, 148, 152–­53, 164, 167, 169, 191, 193 senses, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 50, 84, 161, 174 sentiment, 33, 37, 41, 50, 54 sentimentalization, imperial, 7, 54, 58, 59, 198. See also gaze, Western; “imperial eyes” sermons. See church services servants, 67, 102, 111, 118, 124, 127 settler colonies, 53 Shakespeare, William, 81, 152 Shaw, Samuel, 58, 66 Sheehy, August, 161, 175–­76 Shelley, Percy, 76 sheng, 10, 102, 141, 152–­53, 154–­55 Sheridan, Richard, 139, 185 ships, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 68, 80, 81, 82, 83, 94, 96, 100, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 182, 188, 189–­90. See also boats, small; East India Company; Indiaman; junks; navy shops, 69, 79. See also business shrieking. See screaming Si hai sheng ping. See Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas simplicity, 38, 46, 95, 98, 107, 140, 151, 152, 159, 169, 170–­71, 172, 191, 193–­94. See also under Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques singing, 3, 7, 8, 29, 58, 60, 66–­67, 70, 71, 72, 81, 82, 84, 99, 115, 117, 121, 133, 138, 141, 143, 146, 153, 166. See also falsetto “sing-­songs,” 119 Sinocentrism, 15, 157, 198 sinology, 1, 53, 54, 172, 186, 189, 192 Sinophilia, 18, 91, 165 slavery, 13, 116, 124, 180 Smith, Adam, 47, 104, 158, 193 social life, 66, 73, 74, 83 social science, 20, 27, 28, 110 Society of Antiquaries, 76, 100. See also antiquarianism soldiers. See army soloists, 74 sonata, 30, 39, 171, 172, 176, 177, 193, 198 Sonderweg, 51, 180, 194

song, 44, 50, 74, 75, 76, 79, 83, 85, 100, 102, 105, 113, 114, 115, 116, 143, 147–­48, 151, 152, 153, 185, 186, 187, 192; strophic, 31, 71. See also melody; work songs sound: Chinese, 25, 26–­27, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 68, 69, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83–­85, 111, 115, 118, 135, 136, 137, 138, 155, 165, 182–­88, 190, 191, 192; of imperialism, 188–­99; as knowledge, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 26, 40, 49, 50, 52, 84, 149, 199; of trade, 59, 61, 81, 84, 85 sounding bodies, 23, 32–­40, 48, 191, 194 “sounding stones,” 140, 142 soundscapes, 3, 6, 7, 9–­10, 11, 15, 16, 23, 27, 42, 53–­86, 111, 115, 118, 125, 127, 132, 135, 138, 182, 183, 187, 191–­92 sound studies, 8–­11 South America, 20, 73, 186, 202 South China Sea, 192 South Pacific Ocean (South Seas), 43, 88, 94, 110, 155, 160 sovereignty. See nation Spain, 67, 78 “special path.” See Sonderweg speech, 1, 50 Spinozism, 35, 47–­48 statecraft, 71, 168, 172 Staunton, George, 78–­79, 111, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134, 141–­42, 143, 144, 182, 187 Staunton, George Thomas, 111, 113, 124, 127, 128, 134, 187 sticado, 92–­93, 94, 104 Stock, Jonathan, 135 streets, 9, 68–­71, 68, 73, 79, 84, 96, 118, 133, 188, 192. See also beggars; Old China Street Suard, Jean-­Baptiste-­Antoine, 90, 91, 92, 93, 156, 157, 160, 163, 167 subaltern voices: non-­Western, 12, 14, 21, 24, 58, 63, 80, 138, 157, 171, 196; Western, 8, 21, 55, 63, 79, 80, 82, 83, 138, 196 sublime, 60, 84, 129, 131, 135, 137, 192 supercargoes, 57, 63, 74, 79 surgeons. See doctors suyue, 133 Suzhou, 182 Switzerland, 41 Tahiti, 94 Tainjin, 111, 121

i ndex

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Taiping Rebellion, 14 tax, 60 Taylor, Charles, 44 tea, 4, 6, 16, 26, 114, 189 technology, 2, 8, 11, 50, 195, 196, 198 telos, 16, 17, 196 Temple, Henry John (3rd Viscount Palmerston), 189, 190 temples, 3, 6, 60, 71, 96, 125, 132. See also religion textiles, 26 theater, Chinese, 3, 60, 71–­73, 76, 84, 96, 132–­ 36, 143, 146, 150, 153, 182–­88, 184. See also drama, sung; musical theater; opera theater, Western, 85, 120, 171, 185, 186–­87. See also musical theater; opera Théâtre italien, 32 Thompson, Emily, 10 Tomlinson, Gary, 21–­22, 23 Tonga, 147. See also Polynesia Torén, Olaf, 46, 51 trade, 156, 162, 189, 190; the China trade, 2, 5, 12, 16, 26, 53, 55, 57, 60, 67, 79, 80, 83, 99, 110, 112, 115, 122, 136, 188, 191; traders, 54, 61, 63, 67, 69, 78, 81, 84, 85, 186, 189, 196; trading companies, 57, 58, 78; trading season, 57, 67, 74, 190. See also business; commerce; free trade; hoppo tragédie en musique, 156 tragédie lyrique, 40 travel writing, 4, 5, 6, 12, 16, 46, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59, 61, 73, 87, 92, 94, 95, 111 Treaty of  Nanking, 13–­14, 68. See also Nanjing trills, 143 Trinity College Dublin, 97 triple progression, 33, 91, 148, 152, 192 trumpets, 60, 69, 113, 136 Twining, Thomas, 95, 103

vernacular musics, 21–­22, 23, 42, 106, 133, 146, 160. See also ethnomusicology; folk music vibrato, 142, 143, 153 Vienna, 131. See also Austria Vietnam, 112 violence, Western, 11–­12, 19, 25, 190, 198 violin, 74, 81, 82, 101, 102 Voltaire, 91–­92, 93, 145, 176

“universal ear,” 2, 39 universalism, 1, 5, 17, 22, 32, 35, 36, 39, 40, 47, 52, 91, 164, 185–­86, 192–­93, 197 universal value, 2, 11, 16, 19, 25, 32, 40, 180, 191, 196 upper class. See under class

yayue, 133 yee-­yine, 76, 77, 102, 142 “yellowface,” 115 Yellow River, 175 Ying Shengnang, 18 Yuanmingyuan, 14, 118, 119, 120, 124, 136, 138, 192 yueqin, 142 yurt, 125, 127–­28, 128, 129, 133, 138, 154

van Dyke, Paul, 12, 53 vegetables, used as projectile, 60 Verba, Cynthia, 35

Wales, 97 Weber, Carl Maria von, 42, 82 Weltmachine, 122–­23 Wesley, Garret (Earl of  Mornington), 97 West Indies. See Caribbean Whampoa, 7, 55, 57, 60, 61, 68, 74, 79, 80, 83, 84, 192. See also Canton whip cracking, 132, 137 whistle, 81 Wiener, Oliver, 163–­64 Williams, Eric, 180 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 170, 193 wind bands, 3, 57 windlass, 81 Wolff, Christian, 27, 28–­31, 32, 35, 36, 40, 41, 47–­48, 50, 165, 191; “Oratio de sinarum philosophia practica,” 28, 29, 30, 31, 48 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 158 women, Chinese, 29, 76, 78, 150, 153 women, Western, 66, 73–­74, 137 Wong, R. Bin, 196 wood-­blocks, 134 working class. See under class work songs, 81, 113, 114, 115, 116, 137, 138, 187 worldhistory, 162, 164, 174 “world machine.” See Weltmachine Xiaoqing Ye, 134

Zuroski, Eugenia, 5